Children and Language Mixing: developmental, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects

Description

Whilst bilingualism is often seen as an advantage for children, language mixing provokes some concern among parents and teachers. Language mixing in children is often taken as a signal of low linguistic proficiency. This leads parents to avoid language mixing and ‘cleanly’ stick to one language when talking to their children. However, this restriction does not appear to be feasible in real life: even parents who report that they do not mix, show some degree of mixing (Bail et. al., 2014). The few studies that have investigated parental language mixing report inconsistent findings regarding its effect on the language development of children. This current research will provide a clear understanding of the exact impact of parental language mixing. Besides the lack of research on parental language mixing, there is also no clear model of children’s own mixing. There is evidence that social, cognitive and linguistic factors contribute to children’s language mixing. But again, studies present opposing results (Kuzyk et al., 2019; Bosma & Blom, 2018; Kang & Lust, 2019) and the interactions and joint effects of these factors have not been investigated. Also, no research has been done on the impact of linguistic typology on child mixing behavior. This study aims to fill all of these missing gaps. It will investigate social factors such as attitudes toward mixing in children’s social environment, cognitive factors such as the extent to which children are able to suppress their two languages and linguistic factors such as the language proficiency in both languages. Data will be gathered by means of parental reports, questionnaires, home recordings of bilingual families, linguistic proficiency tests, measures of social and cognitive skills and experimental mixing tasks. These data provide us with insight in the actual language mixing in bilingual homes and the social, linguistic and cognitive factors at play.

Period	25 Mar 2022
Event title	Anéla Studiedag 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	Amsterdam, NetherlandsShow on map