SYNTACTIC FACTORS FOR CODE-SWITCHING IN LINGALA-FRENCH BILINGUALS

Code switching (CS), along with other types of Language contact in bilingual speech, is one of the most studied phenomena in bilingualism research. Our paper focuses on the syntactic aspect of code switching in speech. There are models designed to summarize the fragmented facts about CS and to describe general constraints for any language pair. The Matrix Language Framework Model (MLF) is a model of bilingual speech production that is dominant in the study of the syntactic constraints of CS. The MLF describes the speech production in bilinguals as a sequence of stages that determine syntactic constraints on the generated structures. This research tests the validity of MLF predictions using a grammatical acceptability survey.