Effects of language mixing on bilingual children's word learning

Abstract

Language mixing is common in bilingual children's learning environments. Here, we investigated effects of language mixing on children's learning of new words. We tested two groups of 3-year-old bilinguals: French–English (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English (Experiment 2). Children were taught two novel words, one in single-language sentences (“Look! Do you see the dog on the teelo?”) and one in mixed-language sentences with a mid-sentence language switch (“Look! Do you see the chien/perro on the walem?”). During the learning phase, children correctly identified novel targets when hearing both single-language and mixed-language sentences. However, at test, French–English bilinguals did not successfully recognize the word encountered in mixed-language sentences. Spanish–English bilinguals failed to recognize either word, which underscores the importance of examining multiple bilingual populations. This research suggests that language mixing may sometimes hinder children's encoding of novel words that occur downstream, but leaves open several possible underlying mechanisms.

Bilingual children’s comprehension of code-switching at an uninformative adjective

“…We did not observe a difference in data loss between the two coding methods. Jardak, et al, 2021), further supporting this approach.…”

“…one study suggested that Spanish-English children may have slightly weaker skills in real-time language tasks than French-English children (Byers-Heinlein, Jardak, et al, 2021). Following the functional account, if some children were slower to switch between processing their two languages, or if they were less aware of its meaning, it is possible that they were able to "listen through" the uninformative adjective more easily (or under a prediction-based framework, encountered little to no prediction error).…”

“…prior to or following participation in this study (the order of the two studies was counterbalanced). The results of that study are reported in a separate manuscript (Byers-Heinlein, Jardak, et al, 2021). All stimuli, data, and analysis scripts for the current study are available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ecqwr/.…”

“…As previous studies have found some evidence of individual differences in bilingual children's ability to process code-switching (Byers-Heinlein, Jardak, et al, 2021;Potter et al, 2019), we next investigated how such differences may have affected children's performance on this task. Prior to conducting these individual differences…”

Bibliometric Analysis of Educational Researches on Bilingualism

“…(2022) done studies on best practices for measuring bilingualism; Torregrossa et al (2021) on reference use among bilingual children; Şenaydın and Dikilitaş (2022) on the relationship between bilingualism and identity in addition Gardner-Chloros (2009), Moriguchi and Kanda (2020), Soesman and Joel (2021), Tomić and Valdés (2022), Tomoschuk at al. (2021), Byers-Heinlein at al. (2022), and Broersma et al (2020 conducted studies on code switching in bilinguals.…”