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.

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.