Publications
Publication details [#63480]
Kanto, Laura, Kerttu Huttunen and Marja-Leena Laakso. 2017. Use of code-mixing by young hearing children of Deaf parents. Bilingualism 20 (5) : 947–964.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Journal WWW
Annotation
This inquiry tracked the features and employment of code-mixing by eight KODAs – hearing children of Deaf parents – from the age of 12 to 36 months. The children's interaction was video-recorded twice a year during three diverse play sessions: with their Deaf parent, with the Deaf parent and a hearing adult, and with the hearing adult alone. Besides, data were gathered on the children's overall language evolution in both sign and spoken language. The results displayed that the children wished to generate code-blends – concurrent generation of semantically compatible signs and words – in a way that was in accordance with the morphosyntactic structure of both languages being learnt. A Deaf parent as the interlocutor raised the number of and impacted the type of code-blended utterances. These findings propose that code-mixing in young bimodal bilingual KODA children can be highly systematic and synchronised in nature and can point out pragmatic evolution.