I’d mentioned last week that I was starting to learn more about
codeswitching through collaborative research with Kai Greene. We
have a new paper in Child Language Teaching & Therapy where we
explore the use of code-mixing in children with and without
language impairment. We were interested in how many kids
switched to their other language during testing, if their
switching was related to language dominance, and how successful
they were when they did switch. We examined the semantics data
from the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener (BESOS) that
was given to 1200 children. In this study, we examined only data
from the 5 year olds from the first two years of data
collection: 606 children. The semantics screener has 11 items in
English and 12 items in Spanish and roughly half of these are
expressive items, which were the focus of the analysis. Across
the whole set of kids, about half did not switch from Spanish to
English or from English to Spanish. 19% of the kids codeswitched
from English to Spanish at le