Code-Switching in Bilingual Children

✍ Scribed by Katja F. Cantone (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 291
• Series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 37
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The goal of this volume is to prove that mixed utterances in young bilinguals can be analyzed in the same way as adult code-switching. Analyzing a rich corpus of spontaneous child data, the author provides detailed empirical evidence for latest minimalist assumptions on the architecture of mind and confirms that code-switching is only constrained by the two grammars of the languages involved. The data show that the quantity of mixing in children depends on an individual choice rather than on language development, language dominance, or other factors.

Besides critically reviewing the literature on language mixing in children and adults, this work offers a thorough grammatical analysis of the code-switching data of five Italian/German children. The book provides new insights not only in the field of code-switching and of language mixing in young bilinguals, but also in issues concerning general questions on linguistic theory which are difficult to be answered with monolingual data.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages I-XIX
Bilingualism and Bilingual First Language Acquisition....Pages 1-11
Early mixing....Pages 13-35
The theoretical framework....Pages 37-51
Code-switching....Pages 53-82
Data....Pages 83-110
The analysis of early mixing....Pages 111-158
The analysis of code-switching....Pages 159-228
Findings and conclusions....Pages 229-235
Back Matter....Pages 237-272

✦ Subjects

Psycholinguistics; Applied Linguistics; Germanic Languages; Romance Languages