ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the little-studied question of how children acquire code-switching when brought up in a bilingual community where this is a common practice. Previous studies have paid particular attention to the role of parents in the development of code-switching, but relatively little attention to how code-switching patterns may be modelled for children through their exposure to bilingual input from adult members of the bilingual community. In the work reported here we made use of a previously collected corpus of adult Welsh/English bilingual communication as a proxy for the community linguistic input to developing bilinguals in Wales. We predicted that the code-switching patterns previously identified in this community would also be discernible in a corpus of child data collected from developing Welsh/English bilinguals. We analysed the mixed utterances of seven child speakers aged between 1;9 and 2;6. We found that just as in the adult data, the vast majority of the utterances had a Welsh matrix language or morphosyntactic frame. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the specific input to one of the children in the corpus showed a very similar pattern. We conclude that the code-switching patterns in the linguistic input to children begin to be reproduced in child productions from a very young age.
