Bilingual children as interpreters in everyday life: how natural interpreting reinforces minority languages

Abstract

This study analyses different contextual and linguistic variables that define the natural interpreting instances produced in spontaneous interactions by 19 young bilingual children (average age: 3;7) with different language pairs. In particular, we aim at characterizing the bilingual practice used by these children and (i) involve the consecutive use of their two languages and (ii) are shaped by the communicative strategies used by parents at home. The analysis is based on freely available corpora in CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000) (i.e. FerFuLice, Pérez-Bazán, Ticio, Vila, Deuchar; GNP) and diary annotations (i.e. Ronjat 1913; Leopold 1935-1945; Lanza 1988, 1997, 2001) that comprise the spontaneous and longitudinal production of these children. Our results show that the language strategies followed by parents at home in combination with the linguistic communities where they live play a key role on this bilingual practice.