Language dominance and acquisition of code-switching restrictions in late L2 Spanish-English bilinguals

Co-authored paper presented at the Conference of Spanish in the United States / Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, San Antonio, Texas.

While late L2 bilinguals’ acquisition of these code-switching patterns are often linked to factors like exposure and proficiency, this study examined whether language dominance also influences judgments of code-switching acceptability, using an acceptability judgment task with 113 L1-English L2-Spanish speakers. The results revealed that while L2 proficiency predicted sensitivity to CS grammaticality, language dominance did not, suggesting that once late bilinguals reach sufficient proficiency, dominance plays little role in shaping their grammatical knowledge of code-switching.

Asymmetrical p-stranding: Acceptability data from Spanish-English code-switching

Co-authored article published in Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics.

This study investigates the availability of preposition stranding (p-stranding) in intrasentential code-switching (CS) among US heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish. P-stranding is allowed in English, but in Spanish the preposition is traditionally pied-piped with the DP. Law (2006) argues Spanish is subject to a syntax-morphology-interface condition, which prevents the extraction of a DP from a PP due to D-to-P incorporation. Previous research has suggested that such incorporation depends upon the features inherent to the preposition, with p-stranding only accepted with Spanish-to-English switches (Koronkiewicz, 2022). We expand on that study since it only included one preposition (with/con). Furthermore, it did not explicitly test pied-piping, nor did it include matrix wh-questions, a common context for p-stranding. Results from a written acceptability judgment task show that the participants: (i) dispreferred p-stranding in Spanish compared to pied-piping; and accepted p-stranding in English more than pied-piping. As for CS, they dispreferred p-stranding for English-to-Spanish compared to pied-piping, while for Spanish-to-English it was the inverse. Overall, these asymmetrical p-stranding results align with previous findings (Koronkiewicz, 2022) further suggesting that it is the language of the preposition that dictates incorporation.