Question on adult bilinguals and codeswitching

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

just a thought, but when one searches for a lexical item in a gender
marked language one often uses the neutral masculine and then self
corrects when the lexical item is found if the gender is not
masculine.  Historically it's thought that the feminine is more
marked.
Are there pause patterns  i.e. is it el libro es abajo del.....table.

At 1:41 PM +0000 6/11/02, Gary Morgan wrote:
>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
>--------------------------