Nadando es mi deporte favorito : Infinitives and gerunds in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children and adolescents

This study examines the elicited production of Spanish infinitives versus gerunds among Spanish/English bilingual children and adolescents in the United States. We focus on three contexts: infinitives in subject position, infinitives with the phrasal verb parar de (“to stop doing something”), and infinitives with the prepositional verb parar a (“to stop to do something”). Results showed that children and adolescents produced fewer infinitives than their Spanish-dominant parents in subject position and with parar de , often overextending the gerund. By contrast, all groups performed more accurately with parar a , where English and Spanish align structurally. Language dominance and Spanish experience significantly predicted more target-like infinitive use, while chronological age and English dominance were associated with increased gerund overextension. These findings support the Bilingual Alignment Hypothesis , showing that heritage Spanish morphosyntactic development is gradual and context-sensitive, with greater accuracy in areas of crosslinguistic convergence.