Look at the gato! Code-switching in speech to toddlers

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Bilingual caregivers often use code-switching (CS) when interacting with young children.
• The impact of CS exposure on early language acquisition remains an area of active research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the frequency and types of CS used by bilingual caregivers with toddlers.
• To examine the relationship between parental CS and children's lexical acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Observed 24 bilingual caregivers interacting with their 18- to 24-month-old children during play sessions.
• Analyzed instances of inter-sentential and intra-sentential CS in caregiver speech.
• Assessed children's vocabulary size and related it to parental CS patterns.

Main Results:

• All caregivers exhibited CS, with some using it frequently (over 1/3 of utterances).
• Parental intra-sentential CS was positively associated with children's vocabulary size.
• No detrimental effect of CS on children's word learning was observed; word repetition across languages did not enhance translation equivalent acquisition.

Conclusions:

• Bilingual caregivers commonly engage in CS with toddlers, including within sentences.
• Exposure to parental CS does not appear to hinder, and may even support, early lexical development in children.
• Findings suggest that mixed-language input is a normal aspect of bilingual child-rearing and does not delay language acquisition.