Children with uneven bilingual development prefer the stronger language and mix sentence-internally mainly in weaker-language interactions¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r1 · q3
Currency · newest study 2004 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2009: baselines and conditions change

Subclaims¶

q3 i? With the Swedish interlocutor, children spoke Swedish almost 100% of the time and mixed almost not at all; in Romance-language interactions, over 50% of utterances were in Swedish and mixing was relatively frequent. → Bernardini 2004

Evidence¶

Bernardini 2004¶

Bernardini, P., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(1), 49-69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728904001270

q3 · i? · associational · r1

Analysis of utterance distribution across Swedish and Romance-language interaction contexts for three children (Lukas, Paul, Léo) followed longitudinally. The study found "Mixed utterances were almost non-existent in the Swedish context" but relatively frequent in Italian and French contexts, showing an asymmetry in code-mixing direction.

"With the Swedish interlocutor, the children speak Swedish almost 100% of the time (Figure 2), and in the Italian and French recordings, over 50% of the utterances are also in Swedish (Figure 3). Mixed utterances were almost non-existent in the Swedish context (Figure 2), whereas they were relatively frequent in the Italian and French contexts (Figure 3)."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Syntax — predictor: learners who differ on it differ in outcomes

Related Claims¶

• The amount of input in each language is related to syntactic development and language dominance — related
• The Ivy Hypothesis differs from the Dominant Language Hypothesis and Bilingual Bootstrapping Hypothesis in developmental scope and hierarchical prediction — related
• Code-mixing decreases and ceases as the weaker language syntactic structure develops to CP level — related
• MLU differs by about one word between the stronger and weaker language throughout development — related
• Vocabulary is poorer in the weaker language, with roughly one-third the word types of the stronger language — related
• Mixed utterances reflect the same amount of syntactic structure as monolingual utterances in the weaker language at the same recording — related