Abstract

This paper examines how a pair of Korean–American siblings interact and socialize and how their interactions change over time as the younger sibling starts to go to an English-speaking preschool. A 7-year-old Korean–English bilingual girl and her 3-year-old sister were observed in their home over 23 visits within a year. Their discourse data, including 33h of audio-recordings, were analyzed from the Language Socialization perspective. The older sibling's authority derived from the age-based Korean family hierarchy inevitably played a role in creating shared benefits in the bilingual sibling relationship. After the younger sibling began to speak English, there were noticeable changes in the power asymmetry and language parallelism—the younger sibling's repetition of older sibling's utterances. This study offers insight into the bidirectionality of sibling socialization processes of sibling interactions in relation to their bilingual and bicultural development.

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