Does it matter how you present it? Modality, formality, and speaker type in Spanish-English CS acceptability judgments

Categories LingüísticaLeave a Comment on Does it matter how you present it? Modality, formality, and speaker type in Spanish-English CS acceptability judgments

Co-authored paper presented at the UIC Bilingualism Forum, Chicago, Illinois. [PDF]

This study examines whether the way code-switched sentences are presented in acceptability judgment tasks influences how bilinguals rate them, a question that matters given that such tasks typically rely on written, formal, decontextualized stimuli even though code-switching is often associated with informal speech. Thirty-five early Spanish-English bilinguals rated sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical switches presented in four formats, written in a formal or informal style and spoken aloud by either a heritage bilingual or a late L2 speaker. Participants reliably distinguished grammatical from ungrammatical switches across all formats, with no effects of modality or formality and only a limited, structure-specific effect of speaker type. These null results suggest that bilinguals’ judgments of code-switching are robust to presentation format, giving researchers considerable flexibility in how they design such tasks.

Proficiency, experience, and dominance as predictors of code-switching grammaticality sensitivity in late L2 bilinguals

Categories LingüísticaLeave a Comment on Proficiency, experience, and dominance as predictors of code-switching grammaticality sensitivity in late L2 bilinguals

Co-authored paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), Montréal, Canada. [PDF]

This study examines whether late L2 bilinguals acquire structural constraints on Spanish-English code-switching, such as the restriction against switching between a subject pronoun and its verb or between an auxiliary and its participle. Over 200 L1-English learners of Spanish completed either an acceptability judgment task or an elicited production task, along with measures of L2 proficiency, code-switching experience, and language dominance. All three factors predicted sensitivity to the constraints on their own, but when considered together, code-switching experience showed the most consistent effect across tasks, proficiency was the strongest predictor of acceptability judgments, and dominance was largely subsumed by the other two. The findings show that late L2 bilinguals can acquire these constraints and that how this knowledge surfaces depends on both the task and the linguistic experience each bilingual brings.

Task complexity effects on writing processes and correlations with text features

Categories LingüísticaLeave a Comment on Task complexity effects on writing processes and correlations with text features

Co-authored article published in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics.

Research on task complexity (TC) effects on second language (L2) text features is abundant and has contributed critical insights. Comparatively, less is known about how L2 writers respond cognitively to diverse TC conditions or about potential effects of such processing activity on the characteristics of the texts produced. To expand on previous research, this study examined (i) the effects of TC on L2 writers’ processing activity (operationalized as on-line writing behaviors and macro writing processes) globally and across three time intervals; and (ii) any potential relationship of processing activity with text features (as measured by complexity, accuracy, and fluency indices). In an intra-subject design study, 45 advanced L2 English users completed two argumentative writing tasks (in time-compressed conditions) that varied in cognitive complexity, operationally defined as the provision of ±content support. Processing activity was captured with the keystroke logging software Inputlog, together with a self-rating post-task questionnaire. Results provided little evidence of TC effects on online writing behaviors but showed clearer differences in self-reported macro-writing processes, especially in the complex task condition. The analyses also indicated little evidence of TC effects on accuracy and syntactic complexity, together with selective associations between writing processes and text features across conditions.