Language mixing in young bilinguals

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.