LANGUAGE DIFFERENTIATION IN EARLY BILINGUAL DEVELOPMENT

It has been claimed that children simultaneously acquiring two languag es go through an initial stage when they are unable to differentiate b etween their two languages. Such claims have been based on the observa tion that at times virtually all bilingual children mix elements (e.g. lexical, morphological) from their two languages in the same utteranc e. That most, if not all, children acquiring two languages simultaneou sly mix linguistic elements in this way is widely documented. Although such code-mixing is not well understood or explained, there are a num ber of explanations unrelated to lack of language differentiation that may explain it. Moreover, while language differentiation is widely at tested among bilingual children once functional categories emerge, usu ally during the third year, there is still some question as to how ear ly in development differentiation is present. In this study, we examin ed language differentiation in five bilingual children prior to the em ergence of functional categories (they ranged in age from 1;10 to 2;2 and in MLU from 1.23 to 2.08). They were observed with each parent sep arately and both together, on separate occasions. Our results indicate that while these children did code mix, they were clearly able to dif ferentiate between their two languages. We also examine the possibilit y that the children's mixing is due to (a) their language dominance, a nd (b) their parents' rate of mixing. We could find no evidence that t heir mixing was due to parental input, but there was some evidence tha t language dominance played a role.