Priming of Frames and Slots in Bilingual Children's Code-Mixing: A Usage-Based Approach.

Antje Endesfelder Quick,Maria Frick,Dorota Gaskins

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.726764

Abstract

This article investigates the role of direct input in the code-mixing of three bilingual children aged 2–4 years acquiring English as one language, and either German, Polish, or Finnish as the other. From a usage-based perspective, it is assumed that early children’s utterances are item-based and that they contain many lexically fixed patterns. To account for such patterns, the traceback method has been developed to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances are constructed on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. We apply this method to the code-mixed utterances, suggesting that much of the code-mixing occurs within frame-and-slot patterns, such as Was ist X? as in Was ist breakfast muesli? “What is breakfast muesli?” We further analyzed each code-mixed utterance in terms of priming. Our findings suggest that much of the early code-mixing is based on concrete lexically fixed patterns which are subject to input occurring in immediately prior speech, either the child’s own or that of her caregivers.

Highlights

The predominant goal of language acquisition studies is to understand how children acquire language(s) and why they produce certain structures the way they do
Fion was the second child in the family and had an older brother who was raised as a bilingual. Both parents adhered to the One parent-one language (OPOL) strategy when speaking to the child
Results showed that all three children constructed their mixed utterances around frame-and-slot utterances, such as And me go X as in And me go pois “And me go away” (Eetu)

Summary

Introduction

The predominant goal of language acquisition studies is to understand how children acquire language(s) and why they produce certain structures the way they do. Bilingual children are of particular interest to those studying input-output relations: is their input spread across more than one language but, most notably, languages in contact almost certainly influence each other. Researchers have analyzed code-mixed utterances in adults as well as children and produced a wealth of possible explanations. Linguistic approaches to mixing are probably best known for their search for universal syntactic constraints on the phenomenon (see Gardner-Chloros, 2009 for an overview) as they intend to explain where in an utterance a switch from one language to another may occur, and which elements may be switched (generally the distinction is between lexical and grammatical elements).

Methods

Results

Conclusion