Resumen de Formal features in child and adult code-mixing
Juana Muñoz Liceras, Raquel Fernández Fuertes
In this paper we address the issue of the differences and similarities between the mental representation of language in the native bilingual child, the native bilingual adult and the non-native adult. We will show that the comparativo priorities for the specification of uninterpretable features in a given pair of languages which are already present in the emergent bilingual grammar are carried out to the adult bilingual grammar but do not show up in the case of the non-native grammar. We will further show that in functional- lexical DP code-mixings, child and adult English/Spanish bilingual production data reveal a clear-cut preference for the Spanish D, without showing any specific preference for ‘gender matching’ ítems (those where the gender feature of the Spanish D agrees with the one of the Spanish translation equivalent of the English Noun). We will finally show that when processing code-switched English/Spanish or Spanish/English DPs, L1 Spanish speakers and non-native speakers share a preference for the English D followed by a preference for the default Spanish gender, the masculino. However, in the case of the L1 Spanish speakers, this preference is overridden by the ‘gender matching’ option described above. These results, we argüe, are consistent with an extended versión of the Grammatical Features Spell-out Hypothesis according to which in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the bilingual child, who relies on the two lexicons, will make code-mixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features.
