Bilingual children’s comprehension of code-switching at an uninformative adjective

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/akz96
• Publication Date: 2021-09-03T20:31:16Z
• Authors: Lena V. Kremin; Amel Jardak; Casey Lew-Williams; Krista Byers-Hein...
• Keywords: Adjective; Code (set theory); Grammatical Gender; Sentence processing

Bilingual children regularly hear sentences that contain words from both languages, also known as code-switching. Investigating how bilinguals process code-switching is a crucial component in understanding bilingual language acquisition, because young experience processing costs and reduced comprehension when encountering code-switched nouns. Studies have yet to investigate if are present encounter code-switches at other parts of speech within sentence. The current study examined 30 (age range: 37 – 48 months) processed with an uninformative determiner-adjective pair before the target noun (e.g., “Can you find le bon [the good] duck?) compared single-language good duck?”). Surprisingly, accurately identified object sentence types, contrasting previous findings containing lead difficulties. We conclude functional information conveyed by code-switch may contribute children’s processing.