Abstract
ABSTRACT: The present paper examines the simultaneous development of the two linguistic competences of the bilingual child. It has been observed that language mixing, defined as the indiscriminate combinations of elements from each of the component languages, is most frequent during a very early phase of language acquisition. However, as the child acquires greater competence in the two languages, the language contact which is in evidence (if any at all) increasingly takes the form of code‐switching, defined as language alternations which are constrained by syntactic principles. In the present study, special attention is devoted to the role of functional categories in the development patterns attested, and we defend a position intermediate between the strong continuity and weak continuity hypotheses. Thus, our overview of childhood bilingualism may be viewed as reflecting the convergence of developments in linguistic theory, language acquisition, and language contact.
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