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.