visual world paradigm

  • test: participants are presented with an image and a grid with four words. They have to select the word that best describes the image after listening to a question about the image
  • languages: English, Spanish
  • implementation: eye tracking methodology
  • participants
         children: 41 (L1 Spanish-L2 English); 8 (L1 Spanish-heritage English)
         adults: 32 (L1 Spanish-L2 English); 7 (L1 Spanish-heritage English);
    13 (L1 English-heritage Spanish)
  • objective: to explore how the properties of the two language systems interact in the mind of the bilingual; in particular, the focus is placed on the type of implicit gender agreement mechanism in code-switched copulative constructions with an adjective as subject complement (e.g., the hat es negro)