Investigating naturalistic code-switching directed towards infants

• DOI: 10.1121/1.5101473
• Publication Date: 2019-04-24T04:22:16Z
• Authors: Lena V. Kremin; Adriel John Orena; Linda Polka; Krista Byers-Hein...
• Keywords: Utterance; Code (set theory)

Mixing two languages in speech (i.e., code-switching) is prevalent multilingual settings, including directed towards infants. Prior research suggests a link between parental code-switching and vocabulary size (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Moreover, laboratory work that some types of appear more difficult for infants to process than others (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2017; Potter 2018). This raises the possibility effects depend on parents’ specific behavior terms frequency, location, purpose 2017). studies relied self-report or short lab observations. In this study, we analyze corpus daylong home recordings 21 (at 10- 18-months) from French-English bilingual families Montréal. We will identify instances code-switching, their syntactic direction switch, apparent reason switch (e.g., teaching vocabulary, translating an entire utterance). Preliminary results indicate frequency varies sentences common within sentence. project provide first in-depth investigation about characteristics naturally produced code-switching.