Some wheres and whys in bilingual codeswitching: Directionality, motivation and locus of codeswitching in Russian- Hebrew bilingual children

Aims and objectives: Differences in directionality, motivations and locus of codeswitching
have been reported for children’s codeswitching, but these constructs have not been subjected
to experimental study in order to examine how they may interact. This study investigated these
variables in bilingual preschool children’s codeswitching.
Methodology: Thirty-two Russian-Hebrew bilingual children (mean age 6;3) performed two
tasks: Retelling of narratives manipulated for setting/topic and listener and Conversation with a
bilingual adult. Retelling conditions included a Russian story retold to a Hebrew-speaking puppet,
a Hebrew story retold to a Russian speaking puppet and a Mixed language story retold to a
bilingual puppet. The Conversation task involved responses to questions in Russian, Hebrew and
codeswitched speech about holidays and activities at home and in preschool.
Data and Analysis: All children’s speech was audio recorded and transcribed using CHILDES
conventions for data transcription. Codeswitched utterances were coded for the following:
Directionality (Hebrew-to-Russian/Russian-to-Hebrew); Motivation (psycholinguistic/
sociopragmatic); and Locus (intra-utterance/cross-speaker).
Results: Overall children produced more codeswitching from Russian to Hebrew and did so
more for psycholinguistic motivations (to maintain fluency or to overcome difficulties in lexical
access).                                                                                                                                            Originality: High rates of codeswitching occurred in this study, ranging from 15% to 22% for
Conversation and Retelling, respectively (calculated as codeswitched instances per utterance).
This high rate may be attributed to the experimental nature of the tasks, which intended to elicit
codeswitching in children’s speech.
Significance: Drawing from Green and Wei’s processing model, findings regarding directionality
and motivation are discussed in terms of connectivity and activation.