We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features.
Azuma, S. (1993). The frame-content hypothesis in speech production: Evidence from intrasentential codeswitching. Linguistics, 31, 1071-1093.
2.
Bartra, A. (1997). The "Schwa" as a Functional joker in early grammars . Paper read at the Incontro di Grammatica Generative , Pisa, Italia and VII Coloquio de Gramática Generativa, Oviedo, Spain.
3.
Belazi, H., Rubin, E., & Toribio, A.J. (1994). Codeswitching and X-bar theory: The functional head constraint. Linguistic Inquiry, 25, 221-237.
4.
Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., & Chilosi, A.M. (1993/1994). Protosyntactic devices in the acquisition of Italian free morphology. Language Acquisition , 3, 327-369.
5.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
6.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
7.
Chomsky, N. (1998). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 15. [also as 2000 in R. Martin, D. Michaels & J. Uriagereka, (Eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor or Howard Lasnik. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press]
8.
Chomsky, N. (1999). Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (Ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
9.
Clahsen, H., Aveledo, F., & Roca, I. (2002). The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language. Journal of Child Language , 29, 591-622.
10.
Dale, P.S., Simonoff, E., Bishop, D.V.M., Eley, T.C., Oliver, B., Price, T.S., Purcell, S., Stevenson, J., & Plomin, R.( 1998). Genetic influence on language delay in two-year-old children . Nature Neuroscience, 1(4), 324-328.
11.
Deuchar, M., & Quay S. (2000). Bilingual acquisition: Theoretical implications of a case study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12.
Deuchar, M., & Vihman M. (2002). Language contact in early bilinguals: The special status of function words. In M. C. Jones & E. Esch (Eds.), Language change: The interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors. The Hague: Mouton.
13.
Fantini, A.E. (1985). Language acquisition of a bilingual child: A sociolinguistic perspective (to age ten). Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.
14.
Fernández, R., Liceras, J.M., & Spradlin, K.T. (2000-2005). Bilingualism (English/ Spanish) as a first language: A case study of identical twins. Research project. University of Valladolid / University of Ottawa.
15.
Franceschina, F. (2001). Morphological or syntactic deficits in near-native speakers? An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17(3), 213-247.
16.
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two ? Journal of Child Language, 6, 161-179.
17.
Haegeman, L. (1994). Introduction to government and binding theory . Oxford: Blackwell.
18.
Halle, M., & Marantz, A. (1993). Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection . In K. Hale & J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20 (pp. 111-176). Cambridge: MIT Press .
19.
Harris, J. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27-62.
20.
Joshi, A. (1985). Processing of sentences with intrasentential codeswitching . In D. Dowty, L. Karttunen & A. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational and theoretical perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
21.
Kiparsky, P. (1983). Word formation and the lexicon. In F. Ingemann (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1982 Mid-America Linguistics Conference (pp. 3 -29). University of Kansas: Lawrence, KS.
22.
Köppe, R., & Meisel, J. (1995). Codeswitching in bilingual first language acquisition . In L. Milroy & P. Muysken (Eds.), One speaker, two languages . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23.
Kupisch, T. (2003). The DP, a vulnerable domain? Evidence from the acquisition of French. In N. Müller (Ed.), (In)vulnerable domains in multilingualism (pp. 1-39). Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
24.
Lanza, E. (1997). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
25.
Liceras, J.M. (2001). Bilingualism as a first language: linguistic theory and the issue of codeswitching and language dominance. Research project funded by the Research and Publications Funds, Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa (Canada).
26.
Liceras, J.M. (2002). Uninterpretable features and the issue of language dominance. Paper presented at the European Research Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics, Corinth, Greece, June 1-2, 2002.
27.
Liceras, J.M. (2003). Monosyllabic place-holders in early child language and the L1/L2 "Fundamental Difference Hypothesis." In P. Kempchinsky and C-L. Piñeros (Eds.), Theory, practice and acquisition. Papers from the 6th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and the 5th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese (pp.258-283). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
28.
Liceras, J.M., Díaz, L., & Mongeon, C. (2000). N-drop and determiners in native and non- native Spanish: More on the role of morphology in the acquisition of syntactic knowledge . In R. P. Leow & Y. C. Sanz (Eds.), Current research on the acquisition of Spanish. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [Reprinted in CLAC 3 -electronic periodical-September, 2000]
29.
Liceras, J.M., Spradlin, T., & Fernández, R. (2004). Formal features in child and adult codeswitching. Workshop on Contact Languages. Université de Québec a Montreal . August 27-29.
30.
Liceras, J.M., Spradlin, T., Perales, S., Fernández, R., & Álvarez, E. (2003). Codemixing, language dominance and the "grammatical features spell-out hypothesis."Paper presented at the Canadian Association of Linguistics Conference, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, June 1-4, 2003.
31.
Liceras, J.M., Zobl, H., & Goodluck, H. (Forthcoming). Formal features in linguistic theory and L2 acquisition: learnability, optionality, competence and processing issues. In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
32.
Lindholm, K.J., & Padilla, A.M. (1978). Language mixing in bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5, 327-335.
33.
Lleó, C. (2001a). The interface of phonology and syntax: the emergence of the article in the early acquisition of Spanish and German. In J. Weissenborn & B. Höhle (Eds.), Approaches to bootstrapping: phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition, Vol. 2 (pp.23-44). Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
34.
Lleó, C. (2001b). Determining the acquisition of determiners: On the innateness of functional categories. In J. Herschensohn, E. Mallén & K. Zagona (Eds.), Features and interfaces in romance. Essays in honor of Heles Contreras (pp.189-202). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
35.
Lleó, C., & Demuth, K. (1999). Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield & Ch. Tano (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2 (pp.407-418).
36.
Macwhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk . Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
37.
Macswan, J. (2000). The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: evidence from intrasentential codeswitching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3(1), 37-54.
38.
Marcus, G., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T., & Xu, F.( 1992). Overregularizations in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial number 228, Vol. 57.
39.
Meisel, J. (1990). Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children. Dordrecht: Foris.
40.
Meisel, J. (1994). Codeswitching in young bilingual children: The acquisition of grammatical constraints. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 413-441.
41.
Morgan, J.L., & Demuth, K. (1996). Signal to syntax. Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlaum Associates, Publishers.
42.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1995). A lexically based model of codeswitching. In L. Milroy & P. Muysken (Eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on codeswitching (pp.233-256). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
44.
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J.L. (2000). Testing the 4-M model: Introduction. International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(1), 1- 8.
45.
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J.L. (2001). Explaining aspects of codeswitching and their implications. In J. L. Nicol (Ed.), One mind, two languages: Bilingual language processing (pp.84-116). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
46.
Nicoladis, E., & Genesee, F. (1998). Parental discourse and codemixing in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 2(1), 85-99.
47.
Pérez-Tattam, R., Senn, C., Nicolás, E., &. Liceras, J.M. (2002). Determiners in child L1 and child L2 Spanish: More on the morphological versus the syntactic deficit debate. Paper presented at the IX IASCL/SRCLD joint conference, University of Wisconsin at Madison, July 16-21, 2003.
48.
Petersen, J. (1988). Word-internal codeswitching constraints in a bilingual child's grammar. Linguistics, 26, 479-493.
49.
Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model on language acquisition. Cognition , 28, 73-194.
50.
Platzack, C. (2001). Multiple interfaces. In U. Nikanne & E. van der Zee (Eds.), Cognitive interfaces: Constraints on linking cognitive information . Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
51.
Quay, S. (1995). The bilingual lexicon: implications for studies of language choice. Journal of Child Language, 22, 369-387.
52.
Radford, A. (forthcoming). Feature correlations in nonminative case-marking in L1, L2 and native English. In J. M. Liceras , H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
53.
Roca, I. (1989). The organization of grammatical gender. Transactions of the Philological Society, 87, 1-32
54.
Spradlin, K.T. (2003). Distributed morphology, monolingual overregularizations and word internal codemixing. Manuscript. University of Ottawa.
55.
Spradlin, K.T., Liceras, J.M., & Fernández, R. (2003a). The "grammatical features spell-out hypothesis" as a diagnostic for bilingual competence. Paper presented at the 4th. International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB4), Arizona State University, April 30 - May 3, 2003.
56.
Spradlin, K.T., Liceras, J.M., & Fernández, R. (2003b). Functional-lexical codemixing patterns as evidence for language dominance in young bilingual children: A minimalist approach . In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl & H. Goodluck (Eds.), L2 links: Proceedings of the 2002 Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA-6) Conference . Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press .
57.
Swain, M. (1972). Bilingualism as a first language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California at Irvine .
58.
Swain, M., & Wesche, M. (1975). Linguistic interaction: case study of a bilingual child. Language Sciences, October, 17-22.
59.
Taeschner, T. (1983). The sun is feminine: A study on language acquisition in bilingual children. New York: Springer Verlag.
60.
Toribio, A.J. (2001). On the emergence of bilingual codeswitching competence . Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(3), 203-231.
61.
Travis, L. (Forthcoming). Features: parametrization within the minimalist program . In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum.
62.
Tsimpli, I-M. (Forthcoming). Determiners and Clitics in Greek L2 and SLI grammars . In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum.
63.
Vihman, M. (1998). A developmental perspective on codeswitching: conversations between a pair of blilingual siblings. International Journal of Bilinualism2(1), 45-84.
64.
Vihman, M. (1999a). Cross-linguistic studies of early grammar. International Journal of Bilingualism3(2&3), 105-110.
65.
Vihman, M. (1999b). The transition to grammar in a bilingual child: Positional patterns, model learning and relational words. International Journal of Bilingualism3(2&3), 267-301.
66.
Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5, 311-326.
