Code Switching In Children

Specific language impairment is a condition which makes code switching in language acquisition tremendously difficult for children. These children already display incomplete grammatical abilities in relation to older age groups with typical language. These difficulties are typically shown when interchanging their two languages which, is known as code switching, and is done within sentences. For children with both specific language impairment and bilingualism, their linguistic abilities may differ from one another because their language may be incomplete. Children who are deemed imbalanced bilinguals could be less likely to switch within sentences compared to fluent bilinguals (Meisel, 1994; Vihman, 1998). For example, the usage and grammaticality …show more content…
Therefore, it makes sense that children are proven to use more code switching when they practice their non-dominant language (Lanza, 1997). A research study was completed by Vera F. Gutiérrez-Clellen, Gabriela Simon Cereijido, and Angela Erickson Leone in 2012 with fifty-eight Spanish-English speaking childrenwith and without specific language impairment. These results found that the children with specific language impairment in the present research did not exhibit codeswitching patterns that were significantly different from their peers with typical language development. The children with specific language impairment were able to mix their two languages with typical codeswitching behavior and did not demonstrate a discrepancy in their knowledge of codeswitching limitations, regardless of their ostensible grammatical problems in each language. This appears to be reliable with previous research with young children that found that even in the earliest uses of code switching; constraints may not be violated (Lanza, 1997; Meisel,