Paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference, Portland, Oregon. [PDF]

This study examines how early and late Spanish-English bilinguals handle inalienable possession in code-switching, focusing on the syntactic divergence between the two languages. Results from production and acceptability judgment tasks show that bilinguals have a clear preference for English possessive determiners over definite determiners in mixed sentences, while both Spanish options (possessive and definite determiners) were accepted along side a strong preference for a preverbal clitic. The findings highlight significant variation in how bilinguals navigate this syntactic conflict, offering insights into the interaction between Spanish and English grammar.