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Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2004

PETRA BERNARDINI  and
SUZANNE SCHLYTER
PETRA BERNARDINI
Affiliation:
Lund University
SUZANNE SCHLYTER
Affiliation:
Lund University
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Abstract

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher syntactic structure lexically instantiated in the stronger language combined with lower portions in the weaker language. Code-mixing patterns were studied in five Swedish-French/Italian children aged 2–4. The parts of the code-mixed utterances reflected as much syntactic structure of each language as was used in monolingual utterances in the same recording of each child. This uneven development, which is due to different amounts of input of the two languages, can be accounted for by assuming that syntactic structure is acquired by building each language from the bottom up through lexical learning.

Type
Research article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 2004 , pp. 49 - 69
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

This research is supported by a grant (F686/1998) from The (former) Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. HSFR (now The Swedish Research Council, VR). An earlier version of this paper was presented in the workshop on ‘The Development of the Weaker Language in Bilingual First Language Acquisition’ at IASCL, Madison, USA, July 2002. We thank the discussants in this workshop for valuable comments. We also thank other persons with whom we have been able to discuss it: Susanne Quay, Regina Köppe, Ute Bohnacker, Jonas Granfeldt, and Verner Egerland. We kindly acknowledge Pieter Muysken's attentive comments on the paper. We are also grateful to Maria Engelmark, who gave us access to her diary notes regarding her son Alex.