The Acquisition of Code-switching in Welsh-English Child Bilinguals

In both child and adult Welsh-English bilinguals, code-switching is used productively. Here I focus only on mixed utterances as I define ‘code-switching’ as any instance where two languages are used in the same phrase. Recent theories of code-switching indicate that children’s code-switching does not differ qualitatively from older bilingual code-switching, and that child-switching reflects the acquisition of a pragmatic skill they continue to use later in life rather than being evidence that they begin the bilingual acquisition process with an undifferentiated language system. Here I use Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame model as a framework for analyzing the type of code-switching used by the children and the adults. I investigate the acquisition of Welsh-English code-switching by comparing the children’s distribution of Welsh vs. English Matrix Language to the adult Welsh-English bilingual Matrix Language data. I use the data from 6 children in the CHILDES CG1 corpus, a longitudinal study of Welsh-English bilingual children between the ages of 1-3. I then compare the results to analysis of data from the bilingual Siarad corpus (Deuchar, Davies and Donnelly 2018). I find that the children follow similar patterns of code-switching as the adults when it comes to Matrix Language distribution across the two languages.
References:

Deuchar, M., Davies, P., & Donnelly, K. (2018). Building and using the Siarad Corpus: Bilingual conversations in Welsh and English (Studies in corpus linguistics, volume 81).