PulseTrendingJournal ClubResearchersJournalsExplore
Instagram
HomeTrendingJournal ClubExplore
Synapse
⌘+K
Synapse
August 16, 2026International Journal of BilingualismOpen Access

Speakst Du English? Morphological Code-Mixing in German–English Bilingual Children

View Full Paper
Ask AI
Bookmark
Share

Authors

AQAntje Endesfelder QuickSHStefan HartmannNKNikolas Koch

Discussion

Loading...

Member takes

Overview

Longitudinal corpus analysis demonstrates systematic morphological code-mixing in young German–English bilingual children, indicating that word-internal mixing is shaped by linguistic input.

Key Points

  • To investigate whether morphological code-mixing in young German–English bilingual children exhibits systematic structural patterns and reflects the distribution of linguistic input they receive.
  • Analyzed longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora from 3 simultaneous German–English bilingual children aged 2 to 3 years raised under a one-parent–one-language strategy in Germany.
  • Identified and coded 696 instances of morphological code-mixing by part of speech, mixing category, language of stems and affixes, and inflectional grammatical categories across differing input conditions.
  • Morphological code-mixing occurred at a low frequency, appearing in fewer than 2% of total utterances across all children.
  • Inflectional mixing was the dominant pattern, most commonly featuring German inflectional affixes attached to English root stems.
  • Mix frequency, affix directionality, and compound configurations closely corresponded to each child's input distribution and developmental shifts in language proficiency.

Cite This Study

Quick et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a817980f2fb91fc834acb56https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069261475477
View Full Paper
Ask AI
Bookmark
Share