Question on adult bilinguals and codeswitching

[Gary Morgan]

Dear colleagues, the recent discussion on bilinguals has prompted me the
send out this question.

I have collected spontaneous language data from adult Spanish-English
balanced bilinguals in London England. I have noticed that when they use
Spanish as the matrix language and insert an English noun into the sentence
they use the determiner / el / regardless of the gender of that noun in
Spanish.

el libro es abajo del / table /
the book is under the table

Table is / la mesa / in Spanish

Also happens with demonstratives and adjectives.

My question is does this happen in other Spanish-English bilinguals? I have
noticed it doesn't when the speaker is clearly dominant in Spanish, then
they use the Spanish gender agreement.

I assumed that / el /  was simply being used as a default because there is
no neuter in Spanish but an informal enquiry of people working on
bilingualism has yielded the following: Italian-English and German-English
bilinguals don't act like Spanish but Czech - English bilinguals do. There
might be an explanation in phonology.

Any comments?
Gary
-------------------------
G. Morgan, PhD
Dept. of Language & Communication Science
City University, Northampton Square
London, EC1V 0HB
Tel: 0207 040 8291
Fax: 0207 040 8577,lab: 0207 040 8979
g.morgan at city.ac.uk,
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/g.morgan/index.htm
--------------------------