The present study examines the effects of code-switching (CS) attitudes in Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) among early Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States. In doing so, we explore whether negative attitudes towards CS result in lower/degraded ratings, and, likewise, whether positive attitudes result in higher acceptability ratings. Fifty Spanish/English bilinguals completed a survey that comprised a linguistic background questionnaire and a set of monolingual and code-switched sentences featuring two sets of stimuli, pro-drop (Sande, 2015) and pronouns (Koronkiewicz, 2014), that they rated on a 1–7 Likert scale; additionally, the survey included a final component that gathered information about the speakers’ attitudes towards CS. The pro-drop and pronouns code-switched stimuli gave rise to a total of four conditions. Results from a Linear Mixed Model revealed that all participants, regardless of attitude, distinguished between all Conditions. Furthermore, an effect for attitude was found for two of the conditions, such that the more positive the attitude, the higher the rating given on the AJT. In fact, these two conditions were composed of the CS structures that were rated higher by participants in Sande (2015) and Koronkiewicz (2014). No effect for attitude was found for CS structures that were rated low in the original studies. Thus, this investigation suggests that the attitudes that bilingual speakers have towards CS play a role in the ratings that they provide in AJTs, but in a manner that highlights, rather than obscures, the rule-governed nature of CS.

This paper analyzes the comparability of language dominance assessments with the purpose of determining whether they yield similar results. Language dominance is an important construct in the field of bilingualism as it allows for a more thorough classification of bilinguals and is thought to play a role in both bilingual production and perception. Yet, there is no unified methodology for assessing language dominance. To that end, we ask the following research question: Do different language dominance measures predict the results of one another? Twenty-nine Spanish/English early bilinguals completed four language dominance assessments. Results indicate that three of the four assessments are highly correlated with each other while the fourth, a repetition task, is not significantly correlated with any of the assessments. Further, twenty of the participants were categorized differently across the individual measures; the more “balanced” a bilingual was, the greater likelihood of being categorized differently. These results indicate that certain language dominance assessments are not comparable with one another and suggest that it could be the case they do not even measure the same variable.

This study examines whether L1 English/L2 Spanish learners at different proficiency levels acquire a novel L2 phoneme, the Spanish palatal nasal /ɲ/. While alveolar /n/ is part of the Spanish and English inventories, /ɲ/, which consists of a tautosyllabic palatal nasal+glide element, is not. This crosslinguistic disparity presents potential difficulty for L1 English speakers due to L1 segmental and phonotactic constraints; the closest English approximation is the heterosyllabic sequence /nj/ (e.g., “canyon” /kænjn/ ['khæn.jn], cf. Spanish cañón “canyon” /kaɲon/ [ka.'ɲon]). With these crosslinguistic differences in mind, we ask: (1a) Do L1 English learners of L2 Spanish produce acoustically distinct Spanish /n/ and /ɲ/ and (1b) Does the distinction of /n/ and /ɲ/ vary by proficiency? In the case that learners distinguish /n/ and /ɲ/, the second question investigates the acoustic quality of /ɲ/ to determine (2a) if learners' L2 representation patterns with that of an L1 Spanish representation or if learners rely on an L1 representation (here, English /nj/) and (2b) if the acoustic quality of L2 Spanish /ɲ/ varies as a function of proficiency. Beginner (n = 9) and advanced (n = 8) L1 English/L2 Spanish speakers and a comparison group of 10 L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers completed delayed repetition tasks in which disyllabic nonce words were produced in a carrier phrase. English critical items contained an intervocalic heterosyllabic /nj/ sequence (e.g., ['phan.jə]); Spanish critical items consisted of items with either intervocalic onset /ɲ/ (e.g., ['xa.ɲa]) or /n/ ['xa.na]. We measured duration and formant contours of the following vocalic portion as acoustic indices of the /n/~/ɲ/ and /ɲ/ ~/nj/ distinctions. Results show that, while L2 Spanish learners produce an acoustically distinct /n/ ~ /ɲ/ contrast even at a low level of proficiency, the beginners produce an intermediate /ɲ/ that falls acoustically between their English /nj/ and the L1 Spanish /ɲ/ while the advanced learners' Spanish /ɲ/ and English /nj/ appear to be in the process of equivalence classification. We discuss these outcomes as they relate to the robustness of L1 phonological constraints in late L2 acquisition coupled with the role of perceptual cues, functional load, and questions of intelligibility.

This paper serves as a critical discussion of the phenomenon of intraword code-switching (ICS), or the combining of elements (e. g., a root and an affix) from different languages within a single word. Extensive research over the last four decades (Poplack, 1988; Myers-Scotton, 2000; MacSwan, 2014) has revealed CS to be a rule-governed speech practice. While interword CS is widely attested, intraword code-switching has been argued to be impossible (Poplack, 1980; Bandi-Rao and den Dikken, 2014; MacSwan and Colina, 2014). However, ICS has recently been documented in language pairs ranging from English/Norwegian (Alexiadou et al., 2015) to Nahuatl/Spanish (MacSwan, 1999) to Greek/German (Alexiadou, 2017), and is a robust phenomenon. We review the foundational research on ICS, followed by an examination of the phenomenon from the perspectives of knowledge and skill. First, we examine intraword CS as part of a bilingual's I-language to determine the morphological and phonological restrictions on the phenomenon. We operationalize these restrictions within a Distributed Morphology (DM) framework (e.g., Halle and Marantz, 1994) in which the traditional lexicon is split into three lists. List 1 contains lexical roots and grammatical features or feature bundles, while Lists 2 and 3 detail instructions for phonological realization (i.e., rules for Vocabulary Insertion) and semantic interpretation, respectively. Here we probe the question of whether words which have morphological mixing also have phonological mixing. Second, building on the DM machinery, we present an account for intraword CS in performance via the modular cognitive performance framework of MOGUL (Sharwood Smith and Truscott, 2014). This modular architecture assumes (a) that lexical items are constituted by chains of representations and (b) that extra-linguistic cognitive mechanisms (e.g., goals, executive control) play a role in ICS (Green and Abutalebi, 2013). ICS is licensed by a bilingual mode of communication (following Grosjean, 2001) where the act of CS itself serves an illocutionary goal; it is the real-world context which triggers the complex CS system. Thus, viewing intraword CS as an I-language and an E-language phenomenon provides an explanatory model of the dynamic knowing that and knowing how which is manifest in the phenomenon of ICS.

This chapter examines phonological factors of Spanish/English word-internal code-switching. Specifically, we empirically test the claim that a code-switched word cannot contain phonological elements from two languages (Bandi-Rao & den Dikken, 2014; MacSwan & Colina, 2014). In this pilot study we examine production of English /z/ (not part of the Spanish phonological inventory) in morphologically switched nonce verbs with an English root and Spanish affixes. Data from an elicited production task administered in English/Spanish code-switching and monolingual Spanish conditions indicate that the early Spanish/English bilinguals tested do not maintain English phonology ([z]) in the English root of the switched verb. Instead, Spanish phonology is applied to the entire word, which provides preliminary support for the posited ban on word-internal phonological switches.