In offline judgment tasks, late Spanish learners of L1 English reliably intuit the acceptability of intrasentential Spanish-English code-switches, i.e., codeswitches between languages within the complementizer phrase. Are these felicitous intuitions mirrored in adult L2 online processing?

Experiment 1

CS processing is subject to modulation not only by language internal properties, but also by extralinguistic factors, including the distributional patterns of bilingual language production specific to a given bilingual community. To tease apart the roles of grammar and experience in CS processing, a group of advanced L1 English, L2 Spanish learners (n=39) immersed in an environment with ubiquitous code-switching participated in a reading-while-eyetracking experimental task in which Spanish-English CS production asymmetries that differ on their regional use and frequency were tested. Spanish-English code-switchers from this region of immersion demonstrate a robust preference for code-switches between the auxiliary verb estar and an English present participle (estar + V_Prog) relative to switches between the light verb hacer and an English lexical infinitive (hacer + V_Inf), despite the latter’s syntactic plausibility and attestation in other Spanish-English bilingual communities. Code-switchers from the same region also suspend the use of masculine Spanish determiners (e.g., el) as predictive cues in determiner-noun switches; facilitative processing is only observed for English nouns with feminine Spanish translation equivalents preceded by feminine Spanish determiners (la_FEM house_FEM, Det_SPA,FEM + N_ENG,(FEM)), while English nouns with masculine Spanish translation equivalents are categorically not produced with feminine Spanish determiners. (Presented at FPM2024, ISB14, BHL2024, HSP2024, and BilForum2024)

Experiment 2

To ensure that the time course for environmental frequency effects is distinct from that of ungrammaticality for L2 learners, a follow-up study (n=43) in which the syntactically plausible bilingual compound verb of the form estar + V_Prog is tested against the structurally disallowed switch haber + V_Perf. If L2 learners show differential online sensitivity to grammatical violations and effects of environmental frequency, then the processing cost for the ungrammatical haber + V_Perf form should emerge earlier than that for the syntactically plausible, but environmentally lacking, hacer + V_Inf switch. (Presented at HSP2024 and BilForum2024)

View this project’s pre-registration.

Look out for a forthcoming publication in Isogloss!