This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.

Objectives: This study investigates monolingual and code-mixed utterances in four bilingual children with different language combinations (German–English, English–Polish, Finnish–English, and French–Russian) in terms of utterance lengths (MLUs) and complexities offering a usage-based (UB) explanation based on cognitive mechanisms. Methodology: Utterances from four different child bilingual corpora were extracted and coded for individual monolingual languages and bilingual utterances. Data and analysis: 35.441 utterances between the age of 2–4 were analyzed in terms of MLU and syntactic complexity. Findings/conclusions: Results showed that for all children monolingual MLUs and complexities reflect their input situations: the more input in one language, the longer and more complex those utterances were. However, in all four children code-mixed utterances were longer and more complex from the beginning of the recordings. Implications: This is the first study that systematically compares MLU scores and complexities of monolingual and bilingual utterances taking diverse language combinations into account and offering a UB explanation based on chunking and entrenchment processes as a new alternative for further research in bilingualism.

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