Look at the gato! Code-switching in speech to toddlers

Abstract

We examined code-switching (CS) in the speech of twenty-four bilingual caregivers when speaking with their 18- to 24-month-old children. All parents CS at least once in a short play session, and some code-switched quite often (over 1/3 of utterances). This CS included both inter-sentential and intra-sentential switches, suggesting that at least some children are frequently exposed to mixed-language sentences. However, we found no evidence that this exposure to CS had any detrimental effect on children's word learning: children's overall vocabulary size did not relate to parental inter-sentential CS behavior, and was positively related to within-sentence CS. Parents often repeated words across their two languages, but this did not appear to increase the likelihood of children having translation equivalents in their vocabulary. In short, parents appear to CS fairly often to young children, even within sentences, but there is no evidence that this delays child lexical acquisition.

Bilingual toddlers’ comprehension of mixed sentences is asymmetrical across their two languages

“…Recently, Bail, Morini, and Newman (2015) found that 3%-4% of utterances heard by bilingual children in a laboratory play session contained within-sentence switches, which is consistent with earlier case studies that have estimated the proportion to be between 3% and 20% (Bentahila & Davies, 1995;Goodz, 1989;Nicoladis & Secco, 2000;Pan, 1995;Tare & Gelman, 2011). One unique challenge is the presence of mixed-language sentences, where two languages are used within a single utterance (e.g., Do you like the perro?…”

“…Previous studies using measures of parent report have suggested that language mixing affects children's vocabulary differently in different populations(Bail et al, 2015;Byers- Heinlein, 2013;Place & Hoff, 2016). However, when toddlers heard sentence frames in their non-dominant language, they successfully recognized target nouns in both languages.…”

Bilingualism and increased attention to speech: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…However, results of such offline and self-report studies are difficult to replicate (Paap & Sawi, 2014), and tend to differ from studies using online language measures. For example, Bail, Morini, and Newman (2014) found no effect of parental code switching measured in actual conversations on bilingual toddlers' language proficiency measures. Few studies have used online measures of bilingual speech perception or production to establish neural correlates of differences in mono-and bilingual language processing.…”

Does Exposure to Code‐Switching Influence Language Performance in Bilingual Children?

“…In contrast, Bail et al. () found the opposite pattern, showing that intra‐sentential code‐switching was positively related to 18‐ to 24‐month‐old bilingual children's vocabulary size. Unlike Byers‐Heinlein (2013), Bail et al.…”

“…Unlike Byers‐Heinlein (2013), Bail et al. () derived an objective measure of code‐switching, which they obtained from a parent–child interaction sample; their measure of productive vocabulary size was the same parent‐report measure used by Byers‐Heinlein (). How then to reconcile the rather conflicting findings across these studies?…”