Code-switching in Bilingual Children

· Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics Book 37 · Springer Science & Business Media
4.0
1 review
Ebook
276
Pages
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

This study investigates the issue of code-switching in young bilingual children, in particular, intra-sentential switches, that is, mixing within an utterance. The data come from five bilingual Italian/German ch- dren (age 1;8 to 5 years), who grew up in Hamburg, Germany. The term bilingual is used in order to describe a person who has been exposed to both languages from birth on (Meisel 1989:20). Hence, this work is placed within the research field of Bilingual First Language Acquisition. The present book discusses three main issues. The first assumption concerns language mixing in young bilingual children. Differently from former studies on mixing in children, I claim that bilingual children’s mixed utterances should be analyzed in the same way as adult mixing. I further argue that child grammar is organized in the same way as adult grammar. Therefore, a grammatical development should not explain a different type of switching. In fact, I claim that there is no relation between the development of grammar in child speech and the quality of language mixing. The data rather show that language mixing depends on an individual choice, that is, either children mix throughout or they do not. Following Cantone & Müller (2005), slightly higher rates at the beginning of language production might be due to a performance factor. Since the operation Select has no full practice to pick items according to the language context yet, some errors might occur as long as fluency has not been reached.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
1 review

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.