The social-psychological significance of bilingual code switching for children

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Abstract
The purpose of the research was to examine children's evaluative reactions to bilingual code switching during a dyadic cross-cultural encounter. Children's reactions to code switching were elicited using a segmented dialogue technique whereby they listened to and judged each of an integrated series of speech turns one at a time in their order of occurrence. The speakers were played by English and French Canadian actors and were depicted in the roles of a salesman and a customer. English and French Canadian children were subjects. It was found that the children's evaluations of the speaker's language choices were influenced by (a) situational norms associated with appropriate salesman and customer behaviours; (b) interpersonal accommodation; and (c) ingroup favouritism, but not by sociocultural status differences between French and English. Moreover, their reactions were dynamic in that they depended upon mutual language choices by both actors and the basis of their evaluations changed from the beginning to the end of the dialogue sequence. The findings are discussed with respect to results from other developmental research using simpler elicitation techniques as well as to findings from adolescent and adult respondents.

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