Code-Mixing in the Weak Language: A Case Study of the Simultaneous Acquisition of French, Italian and Spanish

Abstract

The present study investigates code-mixing in a trilingual boy from age 2;8,10 until 4;9,22 who acquires French (from the environment), Spanish (from his mother) and Italian (from his father) simultaneously from birth. Using the child’s mixed (527) and non-mixed utterances (5304) in the Spanish recordings, we will show that the trilingual child is able to separate and use his languages according to the context/situation. The overall mixing rate in Spanish, Diego’s weak language, was low, as expected from the monolingual setting of the recording situation. More importantly, the data contain evidence for situational and metaphorical code-switching in the weak language. If mixing occurs, it is not more frequent in the weak language. The trilingual child has two strong languages, a type-dominant (Italian) and two token-dominant languages, namely Italian and French. Based on the closeness of Spanish and Italian, we observed that the weak language (Spanish) is significantly more influenced by the closer language, Italian, when cases of intra-sentential mixing are considered. This is predicted by Typological Primacy Model (Rothman in Second Lang Res 27(1):107–127, 2011) or Closeness (Liceras and de la Fuente in The acquisition of Spanish in understudied language pairings. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 329–358, 2015).