Silva-Corvalán has published extensively on bilingualism and language contact, and on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic constraints which condition syntactic variation.
There is a universal tendency of semantic bleaching, which is the loss of meaning or emphasis of a word over time, that is present in estar.
[4] This semantic bleaching is a result of the variety of Spanish speakers interacting with the English-speaking population in Los Angeles.
Overall, Silva-Corvalán found that direct English influences on this simplification were difficult to spot; these finding are similar to Nancy C. Dorian and her studies on the East Sutherland Gaelic (ESG)[5] language in 1978.
In a 2014 study Carmen[6] examined the changes that Spanish goes through in 3 generations with an emphasis on grammatical aspects of Bilingual First Language Acquisition.
The presence of Spanish monolingual grandparents in the daily lives of younger generations creates a necessity for the development of the second language.
Her study supports that older bilingual siblings receive more input from the parents and therefore reach a higher level of proficiency in both languages.
Carmen Silva-Corvalán found in her study that the most critical factor that helped the children acquire both languages was positive family attitude.
Carmen Silva-Corvalán writes about the contact situation with English and Spanish languages, and how it led to the formation of Spanglish.