In Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech, the nominal construction is a potential ‘conflict site’ if there is an adjective from one language and a noun from the other. Adjective position is pre-nominal in Dutch (cf. rode wijn ‘red wine’) but post-nominal in Papiamento (cf. biña kòrá ‘wine red’). We test predictions concerning the mechanisms underpinning word order in noun-adjective switches derived from three accounts: (i) the adjective determines word order ( Cantone & MacSwan, 2009 ), (ii) the matrix language determines word order ( Myers-Scotton, 1993 , 2002 ), and (iii) either order is possible ( Di Sciullo, 2014 ). An analysis of spontaneous Papiamento-Dutch code-switching production ( Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2017 ) could not distinguish between these predictions. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure online comprehension of code-switched utterances. We discuss how our results inform the three theoretical accounts and we relate them to syntactic coactivation and the production-comprehension link.
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