Abstract
Studies in connection with simultaneous bilingualism have concerned why bilingual children via the one-parent-one-language rule (the OPOL rule) still code-mix. Various explanations for the existence of code-mixing in young bilinguals have been offered, including a lack of language differentiation, limited language proficiency, and immature pragmatic ability. Despite a number of explanations for code-mixing, there is still no conclusive evidence. The present study investigates code-mixing of a two-year-old Chinese/English bilingual girl from a sociolinguistic perceptive. The investigation focuses on three factors – parental code-mixing rates, parental discourse strategies toward children’s mixing, and the child’s language dominance, and their interactional effects. Monthly recordings of the child’s spontaneous speech in interactions with both her parents together were made from the age of 2;1 to 2;12. The results found in this study support Lanza’s (1992) hypothesis that children’s code-mixing may be influenced by parental discourse strategies toward children’s code-mixing. More specifically, parental monolingual strategies might indicate lack of understanding or acceptance of children’s code-mixing and, thereby, encourage a monolingual context of interaction. In contrast, parental bilingual strategies might reveal understanding or acceptance of children’s code-mixing, and thus encourage a bilingual context of interaction. Furthermore, the effect of parental discourse strategies toward child’s code-mixing would interact with parental code-mixing rates and the child’s language dominance. The findings are summarized as follows:1. Despite a low level of both parents’ code-mixing rates, the child showed more sensitivity to the parental code-mixing rates when interacting with the parent who used more monolingual strategies than when interacting with the parent who used more bilingual strategies.
2. Once mixing codes, the child showed earlier and higher level of sensitivity to her own use of inappropriate language when interacting with the parent who used more monolingual strategies than when interacting with the parent who used more bilingual strategies.
3. The child tended to use grammatical code-mixing when interacting with the non-dominant-language parent (NDP) who used more monolingual strategies, but tended to use lexical code-mixing when interacting with the dominant-language parent (DLP) who used more bilingual strategies.
4. The adoption of more monolingual strategies by the non-dominant-language parent (NDP) diminished the extent to which the child might tend to code-mix more when using her non-dominant language, resulting in low and decreasing levels of code-mixing rates in the non-dominant language.
In conclusion, bringing children up bilingually via the OPOL rule is not as easy as it appears. The OPOL rule can not guarantee a result of successful bilingualism. However, if parents use strategies tactically, their bilingual children as young as two years old are able to separate the two languages in a pragmatically appropriate way. Moreover, learning a second language at an early age will not be at the expense of the native language.
| Date of Award | 2006 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Hui-Tzu Min (Supervisor) |