Code-Switching in Young Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study examines the role of grammatical prerequisites on code-switching in young bilingual children. It is proposed that code-switching is constrained not only by grammatical properties of the languages involved; it is also regulated by principles and mechanisms of language use. Constraints on code-switching are therefore defined as processing principles that, however, depend on grammatical knowledge. They ensure that switching does not result in a violation of grammatical coherence, defined in terms of both linear sequencing and structural configuration. Some of these claims are tested empirically, analyzing the speech of two bilingual children acquiring French and German simultaneously. It is argued that even in the earliest uses of mixing, constraints are not violated; in many cases they do not apply because the relevant grammatical relations do not yet hold. Code-switching is nevertheless used from early on in accordance with these constraints, as soon as a certain kind of grammatical knowledge is accessible. Most importantly, functional categories have to be implemented in the child's grammar.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 141 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.