Does code‐switching influence novel word learning?

Abstract

Code‐switching occurs regularly in the input to bilingual children. Yet, the effect of code‐switched input on language development is unclear. To test whether word learning would be affected by code‐switching, Spanish–English bilingual children (N = 45, 19 boys, MeanAge = 5.05 years; ethnicity: 37 Hispanic/Latino, six Non‐Hispanic/Latino, two unreported) were taught English‐like novel words in two conditions. In the English‐only condition, definitions for novel words were provided entirely in English. In the code‐switch condition, definitions for novel words were provided in English and Spanish, incorporating code‐switches. Children required fewer exposures to retain novel words in the code‐switch than the English‐only condition and this effect was not moderated by children's language ability or exposure to code‐switching, suggesting that code‐switched input does not pose word‐learning risks to bilingual children, including children with lower levels of language ability.

Mixed-language input and infant volubility: Friend or foe?

“…Existing findings show that language mixing can sometimes help infants process bilingual information, especially information in the non-dominant language (Gross et al, 2019;Kremin et al, 2022b;Read et al, 2021;Schott et al, 2021). Language mixing in various forms can also facilitate learning novel words among pre-schoolers (Brouillard et al, 2020;Kaushanskaya et al, 2022;Read et al, 2021;Tsui et al, 2022). Children who receive more mixed input show a larger vocabulary size and more sophisticated language skills (Bail et al, 2015;Place & Hoff, 2016).…”

“…There are several potential explanations for these null results compared to the previously-reviewed negative relations. First, fewer processing costs have been reported when the most natural and common forms of language mixing that young children experience are considered (Kaushanskaya et al, 2022;Kremin et al 2022b;Valdés Kroff et al, 2018;Vaughan-Evans et al 2020). Inter-sentential code-switching is the most common type of language mixing found in bilingual infants' everyday input and no processing cost is associated with processing intersentential code-switching (Byers-Heinlein et al, 2017;Gullifer et al, 2013;Kremin et al, 2022a).…”

“…or a determiner followed by a noun in the other language (e.g., El nem [the novel word]). Previous research found that bilingual children had no difficulties matching a novel word with a novel object while listening to a mixed-language sentence (Byers-Heinlein et al, 2022b) or memorizing the novel words immediately after exposure (Kaushanskaya et al, 2022). In fact, children were not slower to process intra-sentential language mixing even if it occurred at a less expected syntactic locationsfor example, an uninformative pronominal adjective (e.g., "Look at le bon [fr.…”

“…For bilingually-raised children, a carrier sentence in the language that is more familiar to infants might help them recognize the target word in the less-familiar language, despite a potential processing cost (Byers-Heinlein et al, 2017;Potter et al, 2019). Indeed, a subset of preschool-age children performed better in identifying target objects (Kremin et al, 2022b) and learning novel words (Kaushanskaya et al, 2022) when the information was provided in mixed sentences. Preschoolers also benefit from language bridging in the classroom (use translation in children's first language to teach new words in the second language) and reading mixed-language books to acquire a second language (Brouillard et al, 2020;Read et al, 2021).…”