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.
