Constructional patterns in child bilingual code-mixing: A usage-based corpus approach

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Stefan Hartmann; Dr. Nikolas Koch; Dr. Antje Quick
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 504095269

This project addresses the question of how code-mixing utterances in bilingual language acquisition can be accounted for in terms of constructional patterns in the sense of usage-based construction grammar. This approach has proven highly successful in research on monolingual language acquisition but has only recently been adopted in research on multilingualism as well. In the context of the proposed project, code-mixing is defined as the use of multiple question in one utterance, e.g. der moon kann fly ‘the moon can fly’. We argue that a usage-based approach can add important insights to our understanding of multilingual language acquisition in general and children’s code-mixing utterances in particular. To this end, we systematically analyze data of German-English bilingual children and their caregivers using quantitative methods to identify linguistic patterns. Our main hypothesis is that the children’s utterances can be accounted for with the help of constructional patterns – fixed multi-word chunks such as What’s this? and frame-and-slot patterns like [What’s X] – that are abstracted away from the (monolingual) input, and that the children’s code-mixing can be accounted for using such patterns as well. Our database are three corpora of German-English bilingual children aged between 2 and 4 years growing up in different input situations. The corpora we use are unique in terms of size and density: They cover a period of more than one and a half years, with the children being recorded on average two hours per week. A major goal of the project is to add linguistic annotations to these corpora and to make them available to the public. To analyze the data, we use two complementary methods from the recent literature. Using McCauley & Christiansen’s (e.g. 2017, 2019) Chunk-Based Learner, we model the development of the constructional patterns over the course of acquisition on the basis of our longitudinal corpus data. To do so, simple frequency measures are combined with psychologically inspired learning mechanisms in order to develop a (predictive) grammar of a language learner. This method is complemented by a dynamic network approach as proposed by Ibbotson et al. (2019), which models the development of the language learners’ linguistic knowledge on the basis of co-occurrence frequencies and transitional probabilities. All in all, our project can thus contribute significantly to a better understanding of multilingual language acquisition in general and the complex relationship between the input that children receive and their use of code-mixing in particular.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Ad Backus; Dr. Paul Ibbotson; Professor Dr. Brian MacWhinney