Preposition stranding in L1-English L2-Spanish code-switching

Paper presented at the 16th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA), Trondheim, Norway. [PDF]

This study examines how Spanish-English bilinguals, specifically heritage and late L2 bilinguals, handle code-switching (CS) with adverbs, focusing on whether adverb position (pre- or post-verbal) affects acceptability. The results show that English adverbs are only acceptable pre-verbally, while Spanish adverbs are acceptable both pre- and post-verbally in mixed utterances, regardless of bilingual type. This suggests that bilinguals from different acquisition contexts adhere to similar structural constraints in CS, emphasizing the role of the adverb’s language in determining its placement.

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