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Code-Mixing in the Weak Language: A Case Study of the Simultaneous Acquisition of French, Italian and Spanish

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New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 49))

Abstract

The present study investigates code-mixing in a trilingual boy from age 2;8,10 until 4;9,22 who acquires French (from the environment), Spanish (from his mother) and Italian (from his father) simultaneously from birth. Using the child’s mixed (527) and non-mixed utterances (5304) in the Spanish recordings, we will show that the trilingual child is able to separate and use his languages according to the context/situation. The overall mixing rate in Spanish, Diego’s weak language, was low, as expected from the monolingual setting of the recording situation. More importantly, the data contain evidence for situational and metaphorical code-switching in the weak language. If mixing occurs, it is not more frequent in the weak language. The trilingual child has two strong languages, a type-dominant (Italian) and two token-dominant languages, namely Italian and French. Based on the closeness of Spanish and Italian, we observed that the weak language (Spanish) is significantly more influenced by the closer language, Italian, when cases of intra-sentential mixing are considered. This is predicted by Typological Primacy Model (Rothman in Second Lang Res 27(1):107–127, 2011) or Closeness (Liceras and de la Fuente in The acquisition of Spanish in understudied language pairings. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 329–358, 2015).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One reviewer points out that there are many studies which have shown that intra-sentential mixing is related to language dominance, especially if children mix for lexical gaps. Although this is true, we would like to add that in most of these studies no difference between inter- and intra-sentential mixing is made when it comes to the mixing rate of the analyzed children (cf. Sect. 7.2). Furthermore, although some intra-sentential mixing can surely be also attributed to lexical gaps, many studies have shown that this is not the only (and main) reason. Indeed, another possible reason is that intra-sentential mixing in very young children is a case of code-switching. For a discussion of this issue, cf. Cantone (2007). Please note that the longitudinal studies mentioned rely on 23 children studied from the age of 1;6 until the age of approx. 5 years, the cross-linguistic study uses data from 98 bilingual children.

  2. 2.

    The authors also show that mixing is related to language dominance if domains of language use are considered. Mixing of Spanish into Catalan is observed, while the reverse is systematically absent in a Spanish-Catalan society where the testing took place. Mixing is however unrelated to language dominance if measured according to the dimensions of language use, in the present case, measured via the size of the receptive lexicons in the respective languages. In other words, children do not mix more in the language with the smaller lexicon(s).

  3. 3.

    The figure is based on the results published in the research article by Schepens et al. (2013).

  4. 4.

    The project was financed by a grant of the German Science Foundation DFG (project number 232285006).

  5. 5.

    Since the data available for each age period under study is very small, no statistical analysis for these specific periods could be obtained.

  6. 6.

    We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion for a statistical analysis in this respect.

  7. 7.

    Notwithstanding, Fig. 7.6 distinguishes between inter-sentential and turn-specific mixing in order to make our research results comparable with other studies.

  8. 8.

    Diego’s Italian has not been analyzed yet for this aspect.

  9. 9.

    We would like to thank one reviewer for this comment.

  10. 10.

    It is also possible that we did not take into account all possible categories which might have an influence on the child’s language choices. We are aware of the fact that our analysis is tentative in this respect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

    Abira Sivakumar & Natascha Müller

  2. Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Laia Arnaus Gil

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  1. Abira Sivakumar
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  2. Natascha Müller
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  3. Laia Arnaus Gil
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Correspondence to Abira Sivakumar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes

  2. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Cristina Suárez-Gómez

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Sivakumar, A., Müller, N., Arnaus Gil, L. (2020). Code-Mixing in the Weak Language: A Case Study of the Simultaneous Acquisition of French, Italian and Spanish. In: Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Suárez-Gómez, C. (eds) New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_7

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