A Crosslinguistic Study of Child Code-Switching within the Noun Phrase: A Usage-Based Perspective

Abstract

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.

Enabling tool: Estonian-English Code-Mixing of a 2-Year-Old with Balanced Input

“…Another suggestion for the high rate of code-mixing is that it could be developmental at this stage of language acquisition and the supportive environment simply increases the use of it. Code-mixing being a developmental phenomenon has been suggested by Gaskins et al (2019a) and Gaskins et al (2021). Code-mixing is suggested to be more prevalent during this age of language development due to the lack of complete mastery of vocabulary and grammar.…”

The role of grammatical gender in Spanish-English switched DPs and copula constructions..

“…The strategies introduced in section 3.3 have been found in naturalistic data from bilinguals of diverse age groups (i.e., children and adults) and language pairs. In some language pairs, the two languages involved in the switch have gender, as it is the case of French-Dutch (e.g., Treffers-Daller, 1994), German-Spanish (e.g., González-Vilbazo, 2005), Italian-German (e.g., Cantone & Müller, 2008;, and French-German (e.g., Radford et al, 2007); while in other cases, one of the languages has grammatical gender while the other has not, as in the case of English-German (e.g., Gaskins et al, 2021;Jorschick et al, 2011), English-Italian (e.g., Radford et al, 2007) or Spanish-English, the language combination under investigation in this dissertation (e.g., on adults: Aaron, 2015; J. H. Clegg & Waltermire, 2009;Montes-Alcalá & Lapidus Shin, 2011;Moyer, 1992;Otheguy & Lapidus Shin, 2003;Valdés Kroff, 2016;on children: Balam et al, 2021;Deuchar & Quay, 2001;Liceras et al, 2008; Ramírez Urbaneja, 2020; among many others).…”