Question on adult bilinguals and codeswitching

[Madalena Cruz-Ferreira]

Dear Gary,

I have instances of a similar use with Portuguese-English in data from children who are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish and have English as school language. Examples: os wheels, no assembly, for the wheels, at assembly. Both 'wheel' and 'assembly' are feminine in Portuguese (two different genders in Swedish), 'no' is contracted Prep 'em' and masc. article 'o'.
They have Portuguese sandhi in cases like these, no pauses.
Best

Madalena 

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira <mailto:ruz-Ferreiraellmcf at nus.edu.sg> 
ellmcf at nus.edu.sg

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Gary Morgan [mailto:g.morgan at city.ac.uk] 
	Sent: Wed 11/6/2002 9:41 PM 
	To: info-childes 
	Cc: 
	Subject: Question on adult bilinguals and codeswitching
	
	

	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
	--------------------------