Language mixing in bilingual children

Abstract

ABSTRACTLanguage samples of five Spanish/English bilingual children between the ages of 2; 10 and 6; 2 were examined for language mixes. Only 2% of the total utterances examined contained mixes. The most common type of mix involved the insertion of single lexical entries – mostly English nouns into Spanish utterances. Very few phrasal mixes were observed. It was concluded that language mixes do not constitute a major interference in the acquisition of bilingualism since children appear to be able to differentiate their two linguistic systems from an early age.