Journal of child language
-
Journal of child language · May 2021
Code-switching in parents' everyday speech to bilingual infants.
Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents' code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French-English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. ⋯ The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant's understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.