Work

Language mixing in young bilinguals

Year: 1980
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT The speech of four two-year-old children growing up bilingually in a German-speaking community was studied for periods varying between five and nine months. An analysis of their language mixing revealed an initially higher rate of mixing which diminished with a growth in language development as measured in MLU. The data suggest that the children were at various stages in a gradual process of language differentiation thus providing support for the one-system theory of bilingual acquisition. An examination of the distribution of lexical substitutions by part of speech revealed that nouns were most frequently substituted by all children; however, more function words were substituted than content words overall.
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2114448911
FWCI: 1.341
Cites: 13
Cited by: 187
Related to: 10