This dissertation investigates the extent to which bilingual speakers' cognitive representations of the syntactic structures of their two languages are interconnected. This is a substantially understudied domain despite the widespread existence of bilingual/multilingual communities in the world, including the US. To draw solid conclusions about…

Based on the bilingual children's and adults' code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children's CS and compares them with bilingual adults'. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest…

Bilinguals employ both global and local control mechanisms to manage coactivated languages that compete for selection, yet little is known about how they operate on morphosyntactic information. The current study investigated bilingual language control mechanisms for a morphosyntactic production task. Across two experiments, 48 early…

This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two…

This dissertation investigates code-switching (CS), the concurrent use of more than one language in conversation, commonly observed in bilingual speech. Assuming that code-switching is subject to universal principles, just like monolingual grammar, the dissertation provides a principled account of code-switching, with particular emphasis on OV~VO…

This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (tú, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and…

Poplack, Zentz and Dion (PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) examine the often unquestioned assumption that the existence of preposition stranding (PS) in Canadian French is linked to the presence of a contact situation with English in the North American context. Although this issue has been the topic of previous research from a…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

New positive attitudes towards language interaction in the realm of bilingualism open new horizons for sign bilingual education. Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez have innovatively reconceptualised a new cross-disciplinary approach to sign bilingualism, based on both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. According to this framework, cross-modal…

This paper examines the syntax of "GENDER CONCORD" in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not,…

Explores whether the functional element effect (Muysken, 1997), often observed in production, is replicated in on-line comprehension results. Compared results of published frequency counts involving Spanish-English code switches with comprehension-timed experimental results. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the issue of whether there exists a matrix language to a code-mixed (CM) sentence, or whether no feasible linguistic analysis can reliably assign a matrix language to a CM sentence. The examination draws on natural conversations involving Chinese-English CM in Singapore. (41 references) (GLR)

Explores the code mixing behaviors of Puerto Rican return immigrants in interaction among themselves in order to observe how their dual ethnic experience is reflected in the theory of code-mixing behaviors. Subjects were 13 Puerto Rican immigrants who were born in New York City and had been in Puerto Rico for a least 3 years. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on syntactic regularities that underlie language alternations in Spanish-English bilingual speech, and the methodologies that may prove most reliable and informative in the exploration of this focus. Findings attest to the validity of the methodologies and of the elicited data. (Author/VWL)

This study, part of an on-going investigation, analyzes the syntactic aspects of code-switching. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that there are only two general linguistic constraints where code-switching may occur, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. This study describes in formal terms how the two constraints…