Dónde está la ball? Examining the effect of code switching on bilingual children's word recognition

• Main Authors: Morini, G. (Author), Newman, R.S (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press 2019
• Subjects: article; bilingualism; child; Child, Preschool; clinical article; code switching; female; Female; hearing; human; human experiment; Humans; infant; Infant; language; Language; language development; Language Development; male; Male; multilingualism; Multilingualism; preschool child; Recognition, Psychology; sentence processing; speech perception; Speech Perception; toddler; word recognition
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Hearing words in sentences facilitates word recognition in monolingual children. Many children grow up receiving input in multiple languages-including exposure to sentences that 'mix' the languages. We explored Spanish-English bilingual toddlers' (n = 24) ability to identify familiar words in three conditions: (i) single word (ball!); (ii) same-language sentence (Where's the ball?); or (iii) mixed-language sentence (Dónde está la ball?). Children successfully identified words across conditions; however, the advantage linked to hearing words in sentences was present only in the same-language condition. This work hence suggests that language mixing plays an important role on bilingual children's ability to recognize spoken words. © 2019 Cambridge University Press.