Within the past few decades, notable contributions have been made in heritage language education research that continued to gain ground in language pedagogy and teaching practices (e.g., Davila, 2017; Valdes, 2000; Fishman, 2001; Kelleher, 2010; Polinsky & Kagan 2007). This dissertation is guided by translanguaging and social identity, two…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

Considerable research on the two-way Spanish immersion model of education highlights benefits such as biliteracy, high academic achievement in both languages of instruction, and sociocultural competence for students of various linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds. The desire to gain these 21st century skills has caused a proliferation of dual…

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within code-switched Determiner Phrases. Several hypotheses have been considered: is this a property defined by the determiner (Bartlett, 2013), the noun (Arnaus et al., 2012) or the adjective (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009)? Or on the contrary, if a carrier phrase is present,…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

Bilingual language control refers to how bilinguals are able to speak exclusively in one language without the unintended language intruding. Two prominent verbal theories of bilingual language control have been proposed by researchers: the inhibitory control model (ICM) and the lexical selection mechanism model (LSM). The ICM posits that…

Adolescent newcomer students bring a wealth of linguistic and cultural resources to their learning environments--resources that become even more dynamic when combined with those of their peers. While a significant body of research has explored students' deployment of multilingual resources through translanguaging, most of this work does not…

The main research question of this dissertation is the nature of language interaction effects observed in linguistic patterns of multilingual children. Such effects--often described as syntactic transfer/influence of one of the languages on the other--have been richly documented in the multilingualism literature. I review an influential model…

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a "mixed" language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media…

Codeswitching, or the bilingual practice of switching between two languages, is a frequently misunderstood phenomenon in many fields, including education. Given the growing number of bilingual students and English Language Learners in U.S. schools, it is imperative that the field of education be informed by current research in bilingualism and…