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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 5:3 (2015) ► pp.379–407

Code-switching at the auxiliary-VP boundary

A comparison of heritage speakers and L2 learners

| Rutgers University

While early code-switching research (i.e., Poplack, 1980) focused on the possibility of universal constraints on switching, MacSwan’s (2010, 2014) “Constraint-Free” research program centers on the notion that code-switching is only constrained by the interaction of a bilingual’s two grammars. In following with this proposal, the current study examines whether two types of Spanish-English bilinguals are equally sensitive to the (un)grammaticality of Spanish-English code-switching at the subject-predicate and auxiliary-verb phrase boundaries. Twenty-five heritage Spanish speakers and forty-four L2 Spanish learners completed an Audio Naturalness Judgment Task in which they judged grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish-English code-switching at these two syntactic junctions. Results indicate that the L2 Spanish speakers and the heritage bilinguals, regardless of their self-reported exposure to code-switching, correctly differentiated between grammatical and ungrammatical switches, suggesting that they have implicit knowledge of code-switching grammaticality which falls out from syntactic knowledge of the two languages.

Keywords: code-switching, code-mixing, L2 acquisition, heritage speakers, morphosyntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constraint-Based (CB) and Constraint-Free (CF) approaches to CS
    • 2.1Constraints on CS
    • 2.2Constraint-Based Approaches: The Functional Head Constraint
    • 2.3The Constraint-Free (CF) approach to CS
  • 3.CS and Second language (L2) learners
  • 4.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Tasks
      • 5.2.1Audio naturalness judgment task
      • 5.2.2DELE proficiency exam
      • 5.2.3Language background questionnaire
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Subject-predicate CS
    • 6.2Auxiliary-VP CS
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.5.3.04gia
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