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Codeswitching in Bilingual Children with Specific Language Impairment
Vera F Gutiérrez-Clellen1, Gabriela Simon Cereijido, Angela Erickson Leone
1San Diego State University.
The International Journal of Bilingualism : Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Linguistic Studies of Language Behavior
|May 22, 2012
Summary
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) can code-switch effectively between Spanish and English. Their language abilities, not SLI, influence code-switching patterns, influenced by language dominance and testing context.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show grammatical deficits.
- Bilingual children may reveal language difficulties through sentence-level language alternation (codeswitching).
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if children with SLI exhibit different codeswitching (CS) patterns compared to typically developing peers.
- To examine the influence of language dominance and testing language on CS in bilingual children with and without SLI.
Main Methods:
- Fifty-eight Spanish-English bilingual children (with and without SLI) produced narratives and conversational samples.
- Quantified the proportion of utterances with codeswitching (CS) across different age groups and elicitation contexts.
Main Results:
- No significant differences in overall CS frequency were found between children with and without SLI.
- Language dominance and language of testing significantly impacted CS patterns.
- English-dominant children showed more CS when tested in Spanish; Spanish-dominant children showed less CS when tested in English.
Conclusions:
- Children with SLI are capable of grammatical codeswitching despite language challenges.
- Codeswitching is sensitive to sociolinguistic factors, potentially leading to reduced use of a non-dominant or less socially supported home language.
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