Objectives:

This study investigates monolingual and code-mixed utterances in four bilingual children with different language combinations (German–English, English–Polish, Finnish–English, and French–Russian) in terms of utterance lengths (MLUs) and complexities offering a usage-based (UB) explanation based on cognitive mechanisms.

Methodology:

Utterances from four different child bilingual corpora were extracted and coded for individual monolingual languages and bilingual utterances.

Data and analysis:

35.441 utterances between the age of 2–4 were analyzed in terms of MLU and syntactic complexity.

Findings/conclusions:

Results showed that for all children monolingual MLUs and complexities reflect their input situations: the more input in one language, the longer and more complex those utterances were. However, in all four children code-mixed utterances were longer and more complex from the beginning of the recordings.

Implications:

This is the first study that systematically compares MLU scores and complexities of monolingual and bilingual utterances taking diverse language combinations into account and offering a UB explanation based on chunking and entrenchment processes as a new alternative for further research in bilingualism.

中文翻译：

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通往复杂性的门户：儿童双语语音的跨语言比较

目标：

这项研究从语音长度（MLU）和复杂度方面提供了基于用法的基础，研究了四个具有不同语言组合（德语-英语，英语-波兰语，芬兰语-英语和法语-俄语）的双语儿童的单语种和代码混合语种。 （UB）基于认知机制的解释。

方法：

从四种不同的儿童双语语料库中提取话语，并针对单个的单语语言和双语话语进行编码。

数据与分析：

根据MLU和语法复杂性分析了2至4岁之间的35.441语音。

结果/结论：

结果表明，对于所有儿童来说，单语的MLU和复杂性反映了他们的输入情况：一种语言的输入越多，这些话语就越长且越复杂。但是，在所有四个孩子中，从录音开始，代码混合话音就更长，更复杂。

含义：

这是第一项研究，系统地比较了MLU分数以及单语和双语话语的复杂性，同时考虑了多种语言组合，并提供了基于分块和扎根过程的UB解释，作为进一步研究双语的新选择。