Codeswitching in Infant Bilingualism:
A Case Study of a Two-Year-Old Simultaneous English-Japanese Bilingual
Shikano Midori
Nagoya University
Longitudinal data was collected in a case study of a child who was acquiring English and Japanese simultaneously in the United States, and then examined to see if the child's switches in her language were due to linguistic insufficiency or were similar to the kind of codeswitching seen in adult bilinguals. As in an earlier study by Lanza (1992), the data suggested that the young bilingual could differentiate between two languages from the early stages of language development. The subject was also found capable of contextual codeswitching, in which she followed the lead of an interlocutor in switching her language, as well as situational codeswitching, in which she independently changed her language in accordance with changes in interlocutors or venue. Nonetheless, the subject's codeswitching appeared to differ from that of older bilinguals in some respects. There were many instances in which she abruptly switched languages for no apparent reason, whereas codeswitching by older bilinguals has been found to serve conversational functions (Fotos, 1995). Although the subject switched languages and repeated a message on a number of occasions, it was not clear that she did so for pragmatic reasons as older bilinguals do. The subject's high rate of codeswitching between utterances compared to switching within utterances might also be seen to be indicative of less maturity in bilingual communication, as a single word association in one language seemed to drag every element in the utterance into the language of that word. Despite these apparent differences, however, the data suggested that the mixing patterns in infant bilingualism and more mature bilingualism have characteristics in common.
