Language mixing in young bilinguals
- 1 June 1980
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 7 (2) , 337-352
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s030500090000266x
Abstract
The speech of four two-year-old children growing up bilingually in a German-speaking community was studied for periods varying between five and nine months. An analysis of their language mixing revealed an initially higher rate of mixing which diminished with a growth in language development as measured in MLU. The data suggest that the children were at various stages in a gradual process of language differentiation thus providing support for the one-system theory of bilingual acquisition. An examination of the distribution of lexical substitutions by part of speech revealed that nouns were most frequently substituted by all children; however, more function words were substituted than content words overall.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- The acquisition and development of language by bilingual childrenJournal of Child Language, 1978
- Language mixing in bilingual childrenJournal of Child Language, 1978
- A First LanguagePublished by Harvard University Press ,1973
- ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NATURE OF CHILD SPEECH FORMATION UNDER CONDITION OF EXPOSURE TO TWO LANGUAGESInternational Journal of Psychology, 1967