Code-switching in emergent grammars: Verb marking in bilingual children's speech (original) (raw)
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CODE-SWITCHING IN EMERGENT GRAMMARS: VERB MARKING IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN'S SPEECH 1
Th is paper examines the code-switching of verbs in the speech of two children bilingual in Estonian and English (aged 3 to 7). Verbs typically have lower rates of code-switching than nouns, due to their central role in argument structure, lower semantic specifi city, and greater morphological complexity. Th e data examined here show various types of morphological mixing, and include examples which violate the prediction from the literature that only fi nite verbs bear infl ectional morphology from the other language , suggesting that children do not adhere to the same constraints as adults when code-switching.
Languages, 2018
This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children's code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switching and structural transfer from two children (aged 2;10-7;2 and 6;6-11;0) bilingual in Estonian and English, languages which differ in morphological richness and the inflectional role of stem changes. The data reveal code-switching with late system morphemes, variability in stem selection and word order incongruence. Constituent order is analysed in utterances with and without code-switching, and the frame is shown to draw sometimes on both languages, raising questions about the MLF, which is meant to derive from the grammar of one language. If clauses without code-switched elements display non-standard morpheme order, then there is no reason to expect code-switching to follow a standard order, nor is it reasonable to assume a monolingual target grammar. Complex morphological integration of code-switches and interaction between the two languages are discussed.
This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10) were given a standardized test with two production probes and a gram-maticality judgment probe for English verb morphology. Results indicated that all three factors—exposure, complexity, and task type—influenced how closely bilinguals approached monolingual norms. These results are consistent with Gathercole's (2007) constructivist model of bilingual acquisition for the exposure and complexity effects. The task effects can be explained in view of cognitive differences in processing between bilinguals and monolinguals and, thus, are also argued to be compatible with a con-structivist model. The implications of bilingual-monolingual differences for language assessment are discussed.
Language Learning, 2010
This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10) were given a standardized test with two production probes and a grammaticality judgment probe for English verb morphology. Results indicated that all three factors-exposure, complexity, and task type-influenced how closely bilinguals approached monolingual norms. These results are consistent with constructivist model of bilingual acquisition for the exposure and complexity effects. The task effects can be explained in view of cognitive differences in processing between bilinguals and monolinguals and, thus, are also argued to be compatible with a constructivist model. The implications of bilingual-monolingual differences for language assessment are discussed.
Code-switching and register shift: Evidence from Finnish-English child bilingual conversation
Journal of Pragmatics, 1994
In this paper, we attempt to place code-switching in the more comprehensive framework of register change, a feature in all human conversation. We want to argue that code-switching, while unique to bilinguals for obvious reasons, may also be approached as one of the many markers of register change, register change itself taking place in all populations. Fifty-three minutes of naturally occurring conversation by two Finnish-English bilingual children were taped and transcribed. Several patterns emerged: in spontaneous play, the subjects, adopting other characters, spoke their L2, English, while the negotiation of the play often, but not exclusively, took place in the Ll, Finnish. While in our data English, the L2 of the subjects, is restricted to in-character talk, codeswitching to Finnish is not the sole marker of change from play to negotiation. The onset of the negotiation segments is also marked prosodically by voice quality changes, and grammatically, by interrogatives, imperatives, deictic terms, and shifts in tense. On the basis of our data, we suggest that while code-switching indeed very often occurs when the speaker shifts from one conversational task to another, the shift is often marked by other means as well, providing evidence for code-switching as a register variation.
Code switching by bilinguals: Evidence against a third grammar
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1985
Bilingual code switching within sentences (as in “The towel roja was dirty”) is often observed in bilingual communities. The present study addressed two issues. First, what is the nature of the grammatical rules that underlie code switching? Second, how do bilingual speakers acquire such rules? We addressed the first issue by obtaining judgments of the grammaticality of four types of sentences containing code-switched words. Judgments of acceptability seemed to be based on two rules: (1) Code switching can occur only when the code-switched words are positioned in accord with the rules for which they are approriate lexical items; (2) code switching within word boundaries is considered ungrammatical. We addressed the second issue by exploring the effects of age and code switching experience on the grammatical judgments of bilingual children and adults. Extensive code-switching experience did not seem to be necessary for bilingual speakers to know the grammatical constraints of code switching. This suggests that the constraints of code switching are based on the integration of the grammars of the two code-switched languages rather than on the creation of a third grammar. There were developmental changes in the judgments made to the sentences. All aged subjects found sentences that violated the word-order rule (1 above) unacceptable. However, the youngest children (8- to 10-year-olds) found mixing within a word acceptable. This developmental change could be due to a change in the grammar of code switching, in the ability to make metalinguistic judgments, or in the child's general knowledge about the nature of languages.
Distributed Morphology and Bilingualism: Code-switching and Mixed Languages
Distributed Morphology and Bilingualsim: Code-switching and mixed grammars, 2023
This is a chapter submitted to the 'Cambridge handbook of distributed morphology', edited by Artemis Alexiadou, Ruth Kramer, Alec Marantz and Isabel Oltra-Masuet. It is said that a good scientific theory not only makes the predictions it was designed for, it also makes predictions that the original scientist did not know about. Since the early 2010s, there has been an explosion of work in the study of bilingual grammar and code-switching within the DM framework – or, more generally, exo-skeletal models of morphosyntactic structure (Alexiadou and Lohndal 2018, Alexiadou et al 2015, DenDikken 2011, Grimstad et al. 2014, Riksam 2017, López 2020, among others.) The reason for this interest is that the change in perspective on the theory of grammar provided by DM has given researchers an opportunity to gain fresh insights into bilinguals’ I-languages as well as the tools to analyze long standing empirical problems. Most especially, DM has played a crucial role in the development of the Integrationist Hypothesis, according to which the linguistic competence of a bilingual speaker must be regarded as unitary, not as two separate systems. The purpose of this chapter is to explain what it is that DM brought to the study of bilingual grammar and what the study of bilingual grammar brought to DM.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2014
This study investigates verbal morphology in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on past participle inflection. Longitudinal data from 12 German-speaking children with SLI, six monolingual and six Turkish-German sequential bilingual children, were examined, plus an additional group of six typically developing Turkish-German sequential bilingual children. In a recent study (Rothweiler, M., Chilla, S., & H. Clahsen. (2012). Subject verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 39-57), the same children with SLI were found to be severely impaired in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. By contrast, the new results reported in this study show that both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI produce participle inflection according to their language age. Our results strengthen the case of difficulties with agreement as a linguistic marker of SLI in German and show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early sequential bilingual child's performance in one of her two languages.
The acquisition of morphology by a bilingual child: A whole-word approach
Applied Psycholinguistics, 1982
The avoidance of inflectional markers, a kind of "macrodevelopment'' in the acquisition of morphology, is described in this analysis bf the strategies displayed by a bilingual child simultaneously exposed to Estonian and to English. A whole-word approach was manifested in: the acquisition of postpositions before case endings; the learning of pronominal case and other suppletive or irregular forms before regular markers were used; the borrowing of the analytic English construction with have into Estonian; and the preference for did + verb for the expression of the English past tense. In interpreting these data the factor of bilingualism per se is weighed against the possible existence of a whole-word approach to language in general as a manifestation of a particular cognitive style.
Code-switching: a touchstone of models of bilingual language production
2015
The goal of the present thesis was to investigate the production of code-switched utterances in bilinguals’ speech production. This study investigates the availability of grammatical-category information during bilingual language processing. The specific aim is to examine the processes involved in the production of Persian-English bilingual compound verbs (BCVs). A bilingual compound verb is formed when the nominal constituent of a compound verb is replaced by an item from the other language. In the present cases of BCVs the nominal constituents are replaced by a verb from the other language. The main question addressed is how a lexical element corresponding to a verb node can be placed in a slot that corresponds to a noun lemma. This study also investigates how the production of BCVs might be captured within a model of BCVs and how such a model may be integrated within incremental network models of speech production. In the present study, both naturalistic and experimental data wer...