Mixed speech of an early simultaneous bilingual: A longitudinal single case study on Turkish English Bilingualism
Keywords:
early simultaneous bilingualism; mixed speech; translanguaging; longitudinal research; Turkish English bilingualism; single case study; matrix languageAbstract
Early bilingualism suggests that children can simultaneously acquire and differentiate between two different grammars, vocabularies and phonological systems when exposed to those from infancy. In this acquisition process, children make countless codemixing decisions. The present longitudinal and cross-sectional research aims to identify and analyze the main linguistic components in the mixed speech of such an early simultaneous bilingual child, Serdar in Turkish and English so as to reveal the underlying rationale for his codemixing decisions. The main techniques of data collection are verbal recording, observation, note taking and storytelling in this study. The data includes nine transcriptions of spontaneous informal talks, interactions during games, interactions while reading and ten transcriptions of stories as well as 427 mixed utterances (3247 words in total) of the child and their contexts from mother’s logs between June 2020 and May 2021. The results demonstrated a need to extend the existing framework of reference for codemixing rationale in the bilingualism literature to include a new dimension, namely preference of the matrix language for idiomatic and metaphorical expressions. According to the findings, Turkish is the matrix language in Serdar’s bilingualism indicated by a 2.37-fold increase in his utterances predominantly in Turkish syntax with occasional English words inflected with Turkish suffixes. Even though Turkish is the matrix language in 72% of all his mixed utterances, the child also uses English syntax even though his acquisition of English, as the non-matrix language, is relatively slower.
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