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Gender And Heritage Spanish Bilingual Grammars: A Study Of Code-Mixed Determiner Phrases And Copula Constructions, Elena Valenzuela, Ana Faure, Alma Ramirez-Trujillo, Ewelina Barski, Yolanda Pangtay, Adriana Diez

Alma P Ramirez-Trujillo

There has been a growing interest in the examination of the steady state of simultaneous bilinguals. An understanding of what leads to the possible weaknesses in the grammar of early bilinguals can contribute to our understanding of the possible causes of the apparent characteristic ‘failures’ in second language acquisition (Montrul 2008). Spanish has a gender feature for nouns (Carroll 1989) and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives. Problems with the acquisition of gender marking on the noun and/or with gender agreement are well-known in the L2 literature (Hawkins 1998; Fernández–Garcia 1999; Franceschina 2001; Bruhn de Garavito and White 2002; White …