Journal Article

Disentangling grammar and experience

Higdon, Josh, Treadway, Hannah, Valdés Kroff, Jorge

2025

Overview

Code-switching (CS) processing is subject to modulation by language-internal properties and 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 (U.S. east coast) participated in a reading-while-eye-tracking experimental task. Spanish-English CS asymmetries present in the production of bilingual compound verbs and determiner-noun switches that differ in their regional use and frequency were tested. Results reveal that L2 learners are sensitive to the distributional production frequencies of CS present in their interactive context during online processing. However, the onset of these effects is somewhat delayed, indicating that the impact of environmental production frequencies may surface during later stage processing for L2 learners. Results are discussed in the context of experience-based frameworks of sentence processing.