The ‘Phonetic Form Interface Condition’ (PFIC) which prohibits mixed-language complex heads involving a weak (clitic) pronoun and a verb (van Gelderen & MacSwan 2008; MacSwan and Colina 2014) has been proposed to account for the fact that switches involving Determiner Phrase (DP) subjects (this student parle japonais) are both produced and accepted by bilinguals from different language pairs while those involving pronominal subjects (she parle japonais) are seldom found in spontaneous speech and are highly dispreferred regardless of language dominance (Jake 1994; Fernandez-Fuertes et al. 2016). Therefore under the assumption that strong pronouns as the French or Moroccan Arabic strong pronouns in moi dxlt (I went in) or nta tu vas travailler (you go to work) behave like DPs these sequences would be accepted because the PFIC would not be violated. However to the best of our knowledge the status of S-V switches involving strong pronouns (Lui speaks Japanese) or strong-weak pronoun sequences (Lui il speaks Japanese) has not been investigated. In order to determine whether subject strong pronouns have the same status as DPs in Heritage  grammars we administered a written Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT) and a written Forced-Choice Task (FCT) to three groups of adult bilinguals: 10 Heritage Spanish (French dominant) speakers; 10 L1 French/L2 Spanish speakers; and 10 L1 Spanish/L2 French speakers. Both tasks included S-V switches with French or Spanish DPs and strong pronouns as well as with French weak pronouns and strong-weak pronoun sequences. The results from the two tasks reveal that none of the three groups show a preference for strong pronouns or strong-weak sequences over weak (clitic) pronouns.Since the lack of differentiation between the two classes of pronouns is not predicted by MacSwan & Colina’s PFIC we administered an oral version of the code-switched FCT to a group of 10 Heritage Spanish/French-Spanish bilinguals and to a group of 10 L1 French/L2 Spanish bilinguals in order to determine whether DPs and strong pronouns would be clearly differentiated from clitic subject pronouns. The results of this task indicate that the most balanced bilinguals —who also happened to be the ones with a higher degree of literacy— established a DP > strong pronoun > weak (clitic) pronoun hierarchy of preference. However the less balanced group of bilinguals preferred the weak (clitic) subject pronoun. In order to interpret these results we take into account Cardinaletti & Starke’s (1999) proposal according to which the asymmetries that exist between the different classes of pronouns have syntactic morphological semantic and prosodic effects. Therefore we would like to suggest that the degree of bilingualism may play a role in the speakers’ perception of the nature of the different pronouns which would explain why in a code-switching structure some speakers may be sensitive to the fact that strong elements but not deficient elements (clitics) bear functional case-features. If this account is in the right track we may want to further explore whether the status of DPs strong and clitic pronouns in a code-switching structure may be located in the syntax proper.

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