Code Switching in children (January)

 Code-switching is a common phenomenon that bilingual speakers regularly engage in. When bilinguals code-switch, words from two languages are used within a single discourse. Code-switching has been well studied in bilingual adults, particularly with regard to the grammatical and communicative functions of the behaviour. The complexity of bilingual adults’ code-switching generally reveals a sophisticated knowledge of the grammars of both languages and reflects the adults’ competency in using them appropriately. However, there has been much debate with respect to what children's code-switching behaviour suggests about their linguistic competency.

Early studies on children's language alternation behaviours postulated that bilingual children mix or switch languages because they are confused or they are linguistically incompetent. According to proponents of the position that bilingual children mix languages because they are confused and cannot differentiate between the two languages, the lexicons and grammars of both languages in young bilingual children first exist in one single system. Other researchers claimed that bilingual children code-switch not because they cannot differentiate the two language systems, but because they lack the lexical, grammatical and/or pragmatic competence in one or both of the languages known. Recent studies, however, have provided more complex and contradictory evidence. Results suggest that young bilingual children are able to differentiate their two language systems from an early age and their code-switched utterances are systematic and conform to the grammatical constraints of each known language. young bilingual children are able to use their developing language systems differentially in contextually sensitive ways and their code switching shows a good understanding of the grammar of both languages. 

This method focused on observing children in their school environment as most of the experiments on bilingual children is focused on their family setting. It investigated the relationship between children's code-switching and linguistic competency in preschool settings and it adopted a quantitative approach toward the analysis of children's language behaviour.

Method

- Fifty-five English–Mandarin bilingual children aged between 5 to 7 (four additional participants were excluded either because they had very low attendance during the observation days that resulted in very little recording time or because he or she spoke fewer than ten utterances throughout the entire observation session)

- Children were from two private childcare centres in Singapore and both conducted classroom activities in English and Mandarin

- Average amount of English and Mandarin exposure children had at home as reported by the parents was 55.30% and 41.80% respectively

- All children were simultaneous bilinguals expect one who was sequential bilingual but this did not change the results massively so all children were included 

- Average parental highest education level was 3.98

Procedure

Parents were informed about the study and were requested to complete the language background questionnaires that were distributed with the teacher-parent communication book. The observation was conducted for about three hours each day across five different days in each childcare centre. We were thus able to record children's conversations in different settings throughout the week, such as during meal times, craft sessions, and free play. Teachers split children from their respective childcare centre into two groups of 2 to 6 as part of their normal preschool routine. Two research assistants each followed and recorded one group of children with a video camera that also had an audio recorder attached to it throughout the recording duration. The research assistants held the camera and audio recorder as close to the children as possible without interrupting their activities. As the audio and video recording were meant to be as naturalistic as possible, there was no form of intervention from the researchers during the entire recording duration. The video recordings were transcribed and crosschecked with the audio recordings, especially when the conversations were unclear from the video recordings. After the observation sessions ended, children were tested individually on their receptive vocabulary using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The respective teachers were asked to complete a short questionnaire on the language competency of those children who participated in the study approximately six months after the observation sessions ended.

In order to use the transcription efficiently the experimenters divided the script in different categories :

- ambiguous communicators that can be used in either English or Mandarin were marked as non-words and thus automatically excluded from all analyses

- All forms of routinized speech, such as standardized greetings before meal, text or nursery-rhyme reading, and games with standard lyrics were excluded from the analyses as well.

- For English, different words originating from the same word root (NDWR - number of different word roots per minute) were considered as a single word root. (e.g. eat, eating, eaten)

- There were two types of code-switching from the children's utterances: intra-sentential switches and inter-sentential switches. The total amount of code-switched utterances was the sum of both types of code-switching. The percentage of the total number of code-switched utterances made by each child was obtained by dividing the total number of code-switched utterances by the total number of utterances spoken by each child.

Results

An average of 648.78 utterances per child was recorded. The number of observed switches (intra-sentential and inter-sentential switches) in our sample of children constituted a small percentage of their total utterances. There was no child who did not code-switch at all. Of the code-switched utterances, children engaged in similar amounts of intra-sentential switches and inter-sentential switches. Children also produced a greater number of pure English utterances than pure Mandarin utterances and code-switch utterances, and a greater amount of English NDWR per minute than Mandarin. In addition, we observed that the teachers themselves did not code-switch when they interacted with the children. The teachers also did not explicitly encourage or discourage code-switching from the children, although they made efforts to speak in only one language to the children.