The role of a child's productive vocabulary in the language choice of a bilingual family

Abstract

While bilingual children's code-mixing was once taken as a sign that they had confused their languages, many studies have now shown that bilingual children can differentiate their languages from very early in development. Why, then, do they code-mix? This study examined several factors that might contribute to a Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingual boy's code-mixing within the context of the family's language use. He was filmed every week in two observation sessions from age 1;0 to 1;6: one with his Portuguese-speaking father and one with his English-speaking mother. The results showed that about 90% of the child's code- mixing could be accounted for by lexical gaps in one language. Furthermore, the parents' code-mixing could often be accounted for by switching to use words that are in the child's productive vocabulary. These results are discussed in terms of the family's creative use of the child's limited linguistic resources.