The Building Blocks of Child Bilingual Code-Mixing: A Cross-Corpus Traceback Approach

Abstract

This paper offers an inductive, exploratory study on the role of input and individual differences in the early code-mixing of bilingual children. Drawing on data from two German-English bilingual children, aged 2–4, we use the traceback method to check whether their code-mixed utterances can be accounted for with the help of constructional patterns that can be found in their monolingual data and/or in their caregivers' input. In addition, we apply the traceback method to check whether the patterns used by one child can also be found in the input of the other child. Results show that patterns found in the code-mixed utterances could be traced back to the input the children receive, suggesting that children extract lexical knowledge from their environment. Additionally, tracing back patterns within each child was more successful than tracing back to the other child's corpus, indicating that each child has their own set of patterns which depends very much on their individual input. As such, these findings can shed new light on the interplay of the two developing grammars in bilingual children and their individual differences.

Traceback and Chunk-Based Learning: Comparing Usage-Based Computational Approaches to Child Code-Mixing

“…First, data are analyzed using the TB method. For this purpose, we briefly summarize a study conducted by Quick and Hartmann (2021), in which a variant of the method was used. In the following, we first briefly introduce the basic idea of TB and then explain its adaptation for the analysis of Fion's code-mixed data.…”

“…Its basic idea was already anticipated in Lieven et al (1997) and first elaborated systematically in Lieven et al (2003) and finally specified in D ąbrowska and Lieven (2005). In a series of previous studies, we have used the TB method (e.g., Quick et al 2018aQuick et al , 2018bQuick et al , 2018cQuick et al , 2021Quick and Hartmann 2021). As shown in Hartmann et al (2021), the TB method has originally been developed for testing the hypothesis that much of early child language can be accounted for with the help of a fairly limited set of patterns.…”

“…This provides evidence in favor of the usage-based hypothesis that language acquisition is strongly item-based and that children are able to actively construct the complexity of their language(s). In Quick and Hartmann (2021), the Fion data are analyzed in a slightly different way using a variant of TB. Rather than using the last session(s) of the recording as the test corpus, they use the code-mixed data as the test corpus and trace the multilingual utterances back to both the monolingual ones and to the caregivers' input.…”

“…Vihman 2018). However, other studies come to results that contradict the predictions of the approach (Backus 2014;Quick et al 2018aQuick et al , 2018bQuick et al , 2018cQuick et al , 2021V. Vihman 2018;Zabrodskaja 2009).…”

“…As the present paper investigates language switches of a bilingual child within utterances, we follow the terminology also commonly used in language acquisition research by speaking of code-mixing (Di Sciullo et al 1986;Cantone 2007, pp. 15, 56;Quick and Hartmann 2021). A typical example of child code-mixing is the following:…”