Sensitivity to Code-Switching Asymmetries in L2 Sentence Processing

Some Spanish-English bilingual communities in the US and Puerto Rico show a preference for codeswitched verb compounds involving the progressive auxiliary, estar. These switches are produced before or after the auxiliary with similar levels of frequency and acceptability. In contrast, verb phrases involving the perfect auxiliary, haber, show a clear dispreference for switches that occur within the verb compound. This same asymmetry is found in real-time sentence processing in early Spanish-English bilinguals and late second language (L2) speakers of English.

We test 61 late L2 speakers of Spanish immersed in a region where Spanish-English bilingual speech is present to determine whether they exhibit online sensitivity to this asymmetry during online reading. Results indicate that L2 Spanish speakers demonstrate a sustained asymmetric pattern of sensitivity in later stages of reading but only if they engaged in a session where they answered comprehension questions. Another L2 Spanish group that completed forced-choice grammaticality judgments while reading the same sentence constructions did not show sensitivity to the same asymmetry. We interpret our findings to point towards an important role for experience with exposure to community-based code-switching patterns to successfully acquire and deploy during online sentence processing.

Look out for a forthcoming book chapter on this work!