Part of
Spanish-English Codeswitching in the Caribbean and the USEdited by Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo, Catherine M. Mazak and M. Carmen Parafita Couto
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 11] 2016
► pp. 281–300
Edited by Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo, Catherine M. Mazak and M. Carmen Parafita Couto
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 11] 2016
► pp. 281–300
Mixed NPs in Spanish-English bilingual speech
Using a corpus-based approach to inform models of sentence processing
Bilinguals speaking with other bilinguals engage in codeswitching (CS). CS is not a priori predictable, yet bilinguals suffer no appreciable costs to communication. One hypothesis explaining this ease is an exposure-driven account whereby speakers converge upon conventional production patterns, which may help guide comprehension. In this study, I quantify and investigate the use of grammatical gender in Spanish-English mixed noun phrases using a bilingual spoken language corpus. Results reveal a robust gender asymmetry where masculine gender is the default gender when switching into an English noun (e.g. un juice ‘themasc juice,’un cookie ‘themasc cookie’). In contrast, feminine-marked switches are infrequent and used with feminine translation equivalents (e.g. una cookie, ‘thefem cookie’). This asymmetry forms testable predictions for how bilinguals use grammatical gender in CS comprehension.
References
Belazi, H.M., Rubin, E.J., & Toribio, A.J
(1994) Code switching and X-bar theory: The functional head constraint. Linguistic Inquiry, 25(2), 221–237.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D
Bull, W.E
(1965) Spanish for teachers: Applied linguistics. New York, NY: Ronald Press.
Clegg, J.H
(2006) Lone English-origin nouns in the Spanish of New Mexico: A variationist analysis of phonological and morphological adaptations. (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
Deuchar, M., Davies, P., Herring, J.R., Parafita Couto, M.C., & Carter, D
(2014) Building bilingual corpora: Welsh-English, Spanish-English and Spanish-Welsh. In E.M. Thomas & I. Mennen (Eds.), Advances in the study of bilingualism (pp. 93–110). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Di Sciullo, A., Muysken, P., & Singh, R
(1986) Government and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics, 22, 1–24. 
Dussias, P.E., & Cramer Scaltz, T.R
(2008) Spanish-English L2 speaker’s use of subcategorization bias information in the resolution of temporary ambiguity during second language reading. Acta Psychologica, 128(3), 50–113.
Gardner-Chloros, P
(2009) Code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garnsey, S.M., Pearlmutter, N.J., Myers, E., & Lotocky, M.A
(1997) The contributions of verb bias and plausibility to the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 93(37), 58–93.
Gennari, S.P., & MacDonald, M.C
(2009) Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses. Cognition, 111(1), 1–23. .
.Green, D.W
(2011) Language control in different contexts: The behavioral ecology of bilingual speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 1–4. .
.Herring, J.R., Deuchar, M., Parafita Couto, M.C., & Moro Quintanilla, M
(2010) ‘I saw the madre’: Evaluating predictions about codeswitched determiner-noun sequences using Spanish-English and Welsh-English data. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(5), 553–573.
Jake, J.L., Myers-Scotton, C., & Gross, S
(2002) Making a minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(1), 69–91.
Kroll, J.F., Sumutka, B.M., & Schwartz, A.I
(2005) A cognitive view of the bilingual lexicon: Reading and speaking words in two languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(1), 27–48. .
.Labov, W
(1972) Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.
MacDonald, M.C
(1999) Distributional information in language comprehension, production, and acquisition: Three puzzles and a moral. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The emergence of language. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
MacDonald, M.C., & Thornton, R
(2009) When language comprehension reflects production constraints: Resolving ambiguities with the help of past experience. Memory & Cognition, 37(8), 1177–1186. .
.MacSwan, J
(1999) A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching. New York, NY: Garland.
(2000) The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: Evidence from intrasentential code switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3(1), 37–54.
MacWhinney, B
(2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (3rd ed). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Milroy, L
(1987) Observing and analysing natural language: A critical account of sociolinguistic method. New York, NY: Blackwell.
Myers-Scotton, C.M
(1993) Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(2000) The Matrix Language Frame model: Development and responses. In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Codeswitching worldwide (Vol. 2, pp. 23–58). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Myers-Scotton, C.M., & Jake, J
(2015) Cross-language asymmetries in code-switching patterns: Implications for bilingual language production. In J. Schwieter (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of bilingual processing (pp. 416–458). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otheguy, R., & Lapidus, N
(2003) An adaptive approach to noun gender in New York Contact Spanish. In R. Cameron, L. López & R. Núñez Cedeño (Eds.), A romance perspective on language knowledge and use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. .
.Parafita Couto, M.C., Munarriz, A., Epelde, I., Deuchar, M., & Oyharçabal, B
(2015) Gender conflict resolution in Spanish-Basque Mixed DPs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(2), 304–323. .
.Pfaff, C
(1979) Constraints on language mixing: Intrasentential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language, 55(2), 291–318.
Poplack, S
(1980) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Towards a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7/8), 581–618.
Poplack, S., Pousada, A., & Sankoff, D
(1982) Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome. Lingua, 57, 1–28.
Soares, C., & Grosjean, F
(1984) Bilinguals in a monolingual and a bilingual speech mode: The effect on lexical access. Memory and Cognition, 12(4), 380–386.
Trueswell, J.C., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Garnsey, S.M
(1994) Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 285–318.
Cited by
Cited by 39 other publications
Balam, Osmer, Usha Lakshmanan & María del Carmen Parafita Couto
2021. Gender Assignment Strategies Among Simultaneous Spanish/English Bilingual Children from Miami, Florida. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14:2 ► pp. 241 ff. 
Beatty-Martínez, Anne L. & Paola E. Dussias
2018. Tuning to languages: experience-based approaches to the language science of bilingualism. Linguistics Vanguard 4:1
Beatty-Martínez, Anne L. & Paola E. Dussias
2019. Revisiting Masculine and Feminine Grammatical Gender in Spanish: Linguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Beatty-Martínez, Anne L., Christian A. Navarro-Torres & Paola E. Dussias
2020. Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Beatty‐Martínez, Anne L., Michelle R. Bruni, María Teresa Bajo & Paola E. Dussias
2021. Brain potentials reveal differential processing of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in native Spanish speakers. Psychophysiology 58:3
Bellamy, Kate & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2022. Chapter 2. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases. In The Acquisition of Gender [Studies in Bilingualism, 63], ► pp. 13 ff.
Bellamy, Kate & Jesse Wichers Schreur
2022. When semantics and phonology collide: Gender assignment in mixed Tsova-Tush–Georgian nominal constructions. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:3 ► pp. 257 ff.
Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia
Cruz, Abel
2023. Linguistic factors modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 26:3 ► pp. 580 ff.
Denbaum, Nofiya & Ana de Prada Pérez
2021. How do Spanish heritage speakers in the US assign gender to English nouns in Spanish-English
code-switching?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 11:6 ► pp. 846 ff.
Faber, Andie, Luiz Amaral & Marcus Maia
2021. Pronominal Feature Re-assembly: L1 and L2 Pronoun Resolution of Spanish Epicene and Common Gender Antecedents. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14:2 ► pp. 281 ff.
Fernández Fuertes, Raquel, Tamara Gómez Carrero & Juana M. Liceras
2024. Activation and local inhibition in the bilingual child’s processing of codeswitching. Second Language Research
Feroce, Nick, Ana de Prada Pérez & Lillian Kennedy
2021. What Can L2ers Tell Us about Codeswitching? Mood Selection in Spanish. Languages 6:4 ► pp. 200 ff.
Johns, Michael A, Jorge R Valdés Kroff & Paola E Dussias
2019. Mixing things up: How blocking and mixing affect the processing of codemixed sentences. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:2 ► pp. 584 ff.
Johns, Michael A. & Paola E. Dussias
2022. Comparing Single-Word Insertions and Multi-Word Alternations in Bilingual Speech: Insights from Pupillometry. Languages 7:4 ► pp. 267 ff.
Kroll, Judith F., Paola E. Dussias & María Teresa Bajo
2018. Language Use Across International Contexts: Shaping the Minds of L2 Speakers. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 38 ► pp. 60 ff.
López, Luis
2020. Bilingual Grammar,
Munarriz-Ibarrola, Amaia, Maria-José Ezeizabarrena, Varun DC Arrazola & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2022. Gender assignment strategies and L1 effects in the elicited production of mixed Spanish-Basque DPs. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12:6 ► pp. 778 ff.
Pablos, Leticia, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Bastien Boutonnet, Amy de Jong, Marlou Perquin, Annelies de Haan & Niels O. Schiller
2019. Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4-5 ► pp. 710 ff.
Pablos, Leticia, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Bastien Boutonnet, Amy de Jong, Marlou Perquin, Annelies de Haan & Niels O. Schiller
2021. Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching. In Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children [Benjamins Current Topics, 117], ► pp. 211 ff.
Parafita Couto, Maria Carmen & Marianne Gullberg
2019. Code-switching within the noun phrase: Evidence from three corpora. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:2 ► pp. 695 ff.
Parafita Couto, Maria Carmen & Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
2019. El bookorthe libro? Insights from acceptability judgments into determiner/noun code-switches. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:1 ► pp. 349 ff.
Putnam, Michael T. & Robert Klosinski
Ramírez Urbaneja, Desirée
2020. “¿Tú tienes unalittle pumpkin?” Mixed noun phrases in Spanish-English bilingual children and adults. International Journal of Bilingualism 24:4 ► pp. 824 ff.
Salig, Lauren K., Jorge R. Valdés Kroff, L. Robert Slevc & Jared M. Novick
2024. Linking frequency to bilingual switch costs during real-time sentence comprehension. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 27:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Sarkis, Justin T. & Jessica L. Montag
2021. The effect of lexical accessibility on Spanish-English intra-sentential codeswitching. Memory & Cognition 49:1 ► pp. 163 ff.
Stadthagen-González, Hans, M Carmen Parafita Couto, C Alejandro Párraga & Markus F Damian
2019. Testing alternative theoretical accounts of code-switching: Insights from comparative judgments of adjective–noun order. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:1 ► pp. 200 ff.
Suurmeijer, Luuk, M. Carmen Parafita Couto & Marianne Gullberg
2020. Structural and Extralinguistic Aspects of Code-Switching: Evidence From Papiamentu-Dutch Auditory Sentence Matching. Frontiers in Psychology 11
TEUBNER-RHODES, SUSAN, DONALD J. BOLGER & JARED M. NOVICK
2019. Conflict monitoring and detection in the bilingual brain. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 22:2 ► pp. 228 ff.
Tomić, Aleksandra & Jorge R. Valdés Kroff
2022. Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, Nathalie Dion, Dora LaCasse & Shana Poplack
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Jessica Vélez Avilés
Trawick, Sonya & Trevor Bero
2022. Gender assignment: Monolingual constraints contribute to a bilingual outcome. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:2 ► pp. 181 ff.
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R., Paola E. Dussias, Chip Gerfen, Lauren Perrotti & M. Teresa Bajo
2017. Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:2 ► pp. 163 ff.
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R., Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo & Paola E. Dussias
2018. Experimental contributions of eye-tracking to the understanding of comprehension processes while hearing and reading code-switches. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8:1 ► pp. 98 ff.
van Osch, Brechje, Ivo H.G. Boers, Janet Grijzenhout, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Bo Sterken & Deniz Tat
2022. Chapter 9. Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual grammars. In The Acquisition of Gender [Studies in Bilingualism, 63], ► pp. 209 ff.
van Osch, Brechje, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Ivo Boers & Bo Sterken
2023. Adjective position in the code-switched speech of Spanish and Papiamento heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Individual differences and methodological considerations. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Vanhaverbeke, Margot & Renata Enghels
Vaughan-Evans, Awel, Maria Carmen Parafita Couto, Bastien Boutonnet, Noriko Hoshino, Peredur Webb-Davies, Margaret Deuchar & Guillaume Thierry
2020. Switchmate! An Electrophysiological Attempt to Adjudicate Between Competing Accounts of Adjective-Noun Code-Switching. Frontiers in Psychology 11
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.