The Development of Recipient Design in Bilingual Child-Parent Interaction

Abstract

This article explores the development of the language alternation practices of a bilingual child who is growing up with two languages: English, which she speaks with her father and older brother, and Italian, which she speaks with her mother. It reports on a microanalysis of the dyadic interactions between parent and child when the child was aged 18–24 months. The analyses focus on how and when parent and child attend to language alternation as they interact with each other in everyday contexts such as mealtimes, shared book reading, and play. The results of this study frame simultaneous bilingualism as a matter of the local situated concerns of the participants that can nonetheless have a developmental focus. The data are in Australian English and Italian.

Notes

¹ A discussion about differences between these terms is outside the scope of this article; the reader is referred to Auer (1984), Baker (2011), and Gumperz (1982) for definitions and distinctions between them.

² See Genesee and Nicoladis (2007) for a review.

³ The (successful) “labeling” sequence, particularly prevalent in picture storybook reading, is typically made up of an elicitation question, the label as the answer, and an assessment or evaluation in third position.

⁴ See Filipi (2007) for a discussion and analysis of the child’s orientation to mm hm as inadequate for the same data.

⁵ This sequence has been analyzed in Filipi (2013) with respect to the actions of withholding and pursuit. The primary focus here is on the interactional properties of the separation of the two languages.

⁶ The sentence structure for possession, cass coperta, here is distinctly English, as opposed to the Italian word order, la coperta di cass. At this stage, the bilingual skills being examined are at the lexical level only.