Tendencias de mezcla de códigos: Estudio de caso de un niño bilingüe

Zully Paola Pinilla, Purdue University

Abstract

This case study is an attempt to examine and describe the instances of code mixing of a bilingual child in monolingual speech contexts (Spanish / Colombia – English, USA). Code mixing is characterized by being a phenomenon typical of bilingualism in children. In this sense, this study provides a brief description of a bilingual child from three different perspectives: lexical, morphological, and syntactical. On one hand, the lexical perspective helps to determine the types of mixing (intersentential or interutterance, intrasentential or intrautterance) that the participant exhibits. The morphological perspective, on the other, considers the types of morphemes that undergo mixing in the participant‘s lexical repertory. Finally, the syntactic perspective analyzes the well-known constraint called functional head constraint (Belazi et al. 1994). The following research questions are addressed: (1) What type of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc) in the speech of a bilingual child exhibit a greater index of code mixing? (2) Is there a correspondence between the pattern exhibited by the participant and the patterns exhibited by studies in the field in relation with the type of words or, on the contrary, the participant exhibits a totally differing pattern? (3) What types of code mixing does the participant exhibit? Is it at the level of phrases or utterances (intersentential or interutterance) or is it only within a phrase or utterance (intrasentential or intrautterance)? (4) Does the participant exhibit any type of code mixing at the morpheme level? If so, what kinds of morphemes are involved? (5) Will the participant's mixed phrases violate or respect the functional head constraint? And (6) Will the participant find it necessary to perform code mixing in monolingual speech contexts? If so, what could be the reasons that trigger this process? Data collection for the present study included direct observation and note taking of speech samples in the Spanish context (Colombia) and audio recordings of the participant's daily speech in the English context (USA). The collected written notes and orthographic transcripts of both speech samples were analyzed. Results indicate that the participant exhibited no sign of code mixing in the monolingual speech context of English. As for the monolingual speech context in the Spanish language, the participant exhibited code mixing at the lexical level showing similar patterns to those of previous studies in which the predominant category was the nouns. He also exhibited loan blends mostly in the category of verbs. Once the syntactic analyses were carried out, the participant‘s speech showed that his code mixing constituted mostly lexical replacements and coordinated clauses with a coordinator Coordo. The absence of a functional head in one language and its complementizer in another language in the participant's speech implies that the participant respects the functional head constraint and questions the statement that children do not exhibit such restrictions at all. Finally, among the reasons that explain the code mixing present in the participant‘s speech there are: the input to which the participant was exposed in each language, the absence of a lexical entry in his repertory, the presence of his father (in the Spanish context), the presence of bilingual and monolingual composition strategies, and the individual characteristics of the participant. This study acknowledges as its major caveat the disparity in the two methods of data collection used for each of the monolingual speech contexts.

Degree

M.A.

Advisors

Hammond, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics|Developmental psychology

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