Drawing on naturally-occurring bilingual speech from a well-defined codeswitching community in Southern Arizona, this study examined the influence of semantic gender (a.k.a. biological gender), analogical gender, and other-language phonemic cues in modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech. Thirty-four Spanish–English early bilinguals completed a forced-choice elicitation task involving two codeswitching environments: Spanish determiner–English noun switches (Task 1) and English–Spanish switched copula constructions (Task 2). The results revealed that for human-denoting nouns, bilinguals assigned grammatical gender based on the presupposed sex of a noun's referent in both syntactic environments tested. As for inanimate nouns, bilinguals were more likely to assign masculine over feminine gender to such nouns in determiner–noun switches, but not in switched copula constructions. Other-language phonemic cues did not influence the assignment mechanism. A methodological implication is that the study replicated the codeswitching patterns observed in naturally-occurring bilingual speech from the same bilingual community.

本研究利用亚利桑那州南部一个定义明确的语码转换社区自然发生的双语语音，研究了语义性别（又名生物性别）、类比性别和其他语言音素线索在调节西班牙语-英语语码转换中的性别分配中的影响演讲。34 名西班牙-英语早期双语者完成了一项涉及两种语码转换环境的强制选择启发任务：西班牙语限定词-英语名词转换（任务 1）和英语-西班牙语转换系词结构（任务 2）。结果表明，对于表示人类的名词，双语者根据所测试的两种句法环境中名词指称的预设性别来分配语法性别。至于无生命名词，双语者更有可能在限定词-名词转换中将阳性而非阴性赋予这些名词，但在转换的系词结构中则不然。其他语言的音位线索不影响分配机制。方法论上的意义是，该研究复制了在来自同一双语社区的自然发生的双语语音中观察到的语码转换模式。