Code-switching in the speech of a balanced infant bilingual and early talker

Abstract

This case study investigates codeswitching in infant bilingualism and may be of special interest due to the fact that its participant is an early talker and a balanced bilingual. Drawing on English/Greek child data, it studies the relationship between language competence and type of code-switching from a developmental perspective, and aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of code-switching in infant bilinguals. Code-switching was facilitated by an early onset of syntax and is interpreted as an outcome of the child’s growing grammatical and pragmatic competence, rather than of a lack of linguistic resources. The rich set of longitudinal data features situational, discourse-related and participant-related code-switching events, as well as rare contextualisation examples. Code-switching is observed to be a strategy to attain specific communicative goals, such as disambiguation, clarification, disagreement etc., and is constrained by the grammar of English and Greek and the principles of discourse and language use.