Abstract
Psychologists today concur that the mind actively reconstitutes experience. A child's cognitive processes will, thus, take in and actively rework the experience of a bilingual environment. This paper analyzes the codeswitching that occurred in a Chinese-English 4-year-old's temper tantrum behaviour. In one example, he is observed to switch from the unmarked Chinese normally used with his grandmother to English in what seems to be an attempt to gain control of the situation by using what he seems to perceive as the language of power. It would seem, then that early on, a bilingual child is already a ‘rational actor’ (cf. Myers-Scotton, this issue), able to make pragmatic language choices in accordance with how he attributes power to one or the other of his languages.
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