Code-switching in Bilingual Children

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.

New approach: mixing in young bilinguals is the same as code-switching in adults Empirical evidence that only grammars of the two languages constrain code-switching Role of functional categories in mixed utterances is reanalyzed and developed Mixed utterances help to shed light on issues in linguistics theory

Klappentext

The goal of this volume is to prove that mixed utterances in young bilinguals can be analyzed in the same way as adult code-switching. Analyzing a rich corpus of spontaneous child data, the author provides detailed empirical evidence for latest minimalist assumptions on the architecture of mind and confirms that code-switching is only constrained by the two grammars of the languages involved. The data show that the quantity of mixing in children depends on an individual choice rather than on language development, language dominance, or other factors.

Besides critically reviewing the literature on language mixing in children and adults, this work offers a thorough grammatical analysis of the code-switching data of five Italian/German children. The book provides new insights not only in the field of code-switching and of language mixing in young bilinguals, but also in issues concerning general questions on linguistic theory which are difficult to be answered with monolingual data.

Inhalt
Bilingualism and Bilingual First Language Acquisition.- Early mixing.- The theoretical framework.- Code-switching.- Data.- The analysis of early mixing.- The analysis of code-switching.- Findings and conclusions.