Bryan Koronkiewicz

Introduction: It has been argued that certain words can “trigger” intrasentential code-switching. While some researchers suggest that cognates establish triggering at the lexical level, others have argued that words that lack direct translations are more natural stories switch. Yet to be tested experimentally is to what extent different types of lexical items influence the acceptability of mixed utterances.

Methods: The current study investigates this methodological consideration for code-switching research by having early US Spanish-English bilinguals (i.e., heritage speakers of Spanish) complete an acceptability judgment task with a 7-point Likert scale directly comparing cognates (e.g., sopa “soup”) and culturally specific items (e.g., pozole “traditional Mexican soup”) in otherwise identical grammatical switched sentences (N = 24).

Results: The results showed that there was no significant effect of condition (p = 0.623) suggesting that cognates and language-specific items are equally acceptable in code-switched sentences. Indeed all conditions were rated on average above 6.

Discussion: These findings show that in this context, judgment tasks are not affected differently by these types of lexical items.

Intraclausal code-switching is a common bilingual phenomenon that occurs when multiple languages are used in the same utterance. Research has shown that such switching is not arbitrary, but rather systematic and rule-governed. By looking at the syntactic interactions between languages, we can shed light on our understanding of a variety of structural factors as well as bilingual grammars more generally. The present study focuses on data from Spanish- English inalienable possession, which is manifested differently in the two languages (e.g., he washed his face vs. él se lavó la cara ‘(lit.) he to himself washed the face’). The results of an acceptability judgment task completed by US heritage speakers of Spanish suggest that regardless of the direction of the switch, an English-like structure is preferred with a possessive determiner (e.g., he washed su cara), and in the case of a Spanish verb switched with an English object, the preverbal clitic is required as well (e.g., él se lavó his face). Overall, the findings support the view that multiple bilingual alignments (Sánchez, 2019) can be accessed by these individuals both in their monolingual Spanish and in code-switching, suggesting that the bilingual alignments hypothesis can be a useful lens for understanding code-switching patterns.