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.
