Parental Discourse and Codemixing in Bilingual Children

Various explanations for young bilingual children's codemixing have been offered, including that it is influenced by the particular discourse strategies parents use in conversation with their children. To date, Lanza (1992) has proposed the most explicit version of this hypothesis. She suggested that certain parental speech acts in response to children's codemixing encourage continued codemixing while others discourage it. The present study was undertaken to replicate Lanza's study. Five French-English bilingual families in Montreal were studied, starting when most of the children were 2;0 and continuing until they were 2;6. Two analyses were performed; one looked at the relationship between parental style of response and children's rates of codemixing and the second looked at the effect of particular responses on children's codemixing in the next conversational turn. The results of both analyses did not support the hypothesis. We suggest that the differences in sociolinguistic context between the two studies may account for the different results.