Mixed speech of bilingual children in a Russian family

Mixed speech is observed in bilingual interactions with code-switching. Code-switching is the use of units of one language within utterances in another language. The paper deals with structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects of two bilingual siblings' mixed speech at two earliest stages - before they were 36 months old. An additional objective is to reveal common and specific characteristics of mixed utterances in the speech of two children growing in the same family. The boys acquire Russian and English simultaneously in 'one parent - one language' bilingual context within a Russian family in a Russian city. The age difference between the boys is 28 months. Their bilingualism is developed in monoethnic settings, which means that both parents and other relatives belong to the same ethnic group, but they have chosen two languages to speak with the children: mother and her relatives use Russian, their native tongue, while father and his parents (the children's grandmother and grandfather) use English, their non-native tongue. The children's bilingualism is treated as a naturalistic one since special training is excluded from the process: the boys acquire both languages in everyday communication. Structural features of the boys' bilingual utterances are analyzed within the framework of the Matrix Language Frame Model (MLFM) elaborated by C. Myers-Scotton (USA) for adult speech. The authors describe the main principles of MLFM and the classification of code-switches that is based on the model. MLFM has been adopted here for the analysis of child bilingual utterances. The authors found out that mixed utterances at the first two stages of bilingual development show the following characteristics: • in most cases it is hard to differentiate between the Matrix and the Embedded languages; • the main principles of the MLFM are violated, especially the system morphemes one; • the only structural type of code-switches at the first stage of bilingual development is a one-word insertion; other types, though sporadically, appear at the second stage; • intrasentential code-switches are almost always nouns; • the most salient pragmatic reasons for bilingual mixing are based on the use of two interrelated strategies employed by the children - relief strategy and mutual exclusivity strategy; • some early code-switches can be viewed upon as partial interlanguage interpreting of the utterances that the children extracted from adults' speech addressed to them. The comparison of the siblings' mixed utterances has revealed that at the first two stages there are more common than specific characteristics in all aspects of their code-switching. The differences are age-related: (1) the elder brother demonstrated more variability in structural characteristics of code-switches since he acquired system morphemes of both Matrix and Embedded Languages earlier and more actively;(2) the younger brother used self-interpreting and spontaneous interpreting earlier and more actively.

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