The present study examines the effects of code-switching (CS) attitudes in Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) among early Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States. In doing so, we explore whether negative attitudes towards CS result in lower/degraded ratings, and, likewise, whether positive attitudes result in higher acceptability ratings. Fifty Spanish/English bilinguals completed a survey that comprised a linguistic background questionnaire and a set of monolingual and code-switched sentences featuring two sets of stimuli, pro-drop (Sande, 2015) and pronouns (Koronkiewicz, 2014), that they rated on a 1–7 Likert scale; additionally, the survey included a final component that gathered information about the speakers’ attitudes towards CS. The pro-drop and pronouns code-switched stimuli gave rise to a total of four conditions. Results from a Linear Mixed Model revealed that all participants, regardless of attitude, distinguished between all Conditions. Furthermore, an effect for attitude was found for two of the conditions, such that the more positive the attitude, the higher the rating given on the AJT. In fact, these two conditions were composed of the CS structures that were rated higher by participants in Sande (2015) and Koronkiewicz (2014). No effect for attitude was found for CS structures that were rated low in the original studies. Thus, this investigation suggests that the attitudes that bilingual speakers have towards CS play a role in the ratings that they provide in AJTs, but in a manner that highlights, rather than obscures, the rule-governed nature of CS.

This study examines the gender assignment strategies used in Gernika Basque (Basque Country, Spain) in Basque/Spanish mixed Determiner Phrases. Twenty-one simultaneous Basque/Spanish bilinguals completed a survey that comprised an Acceptability Judgment Task of code-switched sentences that they rated on a 1-7 Likert scale, a Forced-choice task, a Basque and a Spanish proficiency test, and a linguistic background questionnaire. Results from two Linear Mixed Models revealed that participants use two gender assignment strategies. In general, the bilinguals from Gernika that we studied preferred to assign the Spanish masculine determiner, el, to most Basque nouns. However, there is an exception when the Basque noun ends in lexical a. In these cases, they preferred to assign the Spanish feminine determiner, la, potentially as a result of homophony with the canonical ending for Spanish feminine nouns, also a. Additionally, they strongly dispreferred "double determiner constructions" (i.e. mixed DPs with both the Basque and the Spanish determiner). The gender assignment strategies used by simultaneous bilinguals from the Gernika region align with those used by English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals, as reported in Liceras et al. (2008). However, our results contrast with what Parafita-Couto et al. (2015) found for the same language pair; we discuss these differences and explore a possible explanation for them in our discussion section.

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