Interlingual duplicating in the speech of bilingual children

¹ Cherepovets State University, Prospekt Lunacharskogo, 5, Cherepovets, 162600, Russian Federation
² The University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3010, Melbourne, Australia

^* Corresponding author: chirsheva@mail.ru

Abstract

Bilinguals of every age sometimes double units of one language with those of the other, especially in the situations where they have to interact with speakers of different languages. Bilingual communication stimulates code-switches, various in their structure and pragmatics. Among them, researchers observe the following phenomena in bilingual children’s speech: a) double morphology, b) translation/interpreting equivalents combinations, and c) self-interpreting. However, the interrelation between structural and semantic/pragmatic aspects, on the one hand, and the developmental characteristics of childhood bilingualism, on the other hand, have been underresearched. The authors of the paper argue that various cases of interlingual duplicating can indicate the balance between the competences of children in their two languages at different stages of their bilingual development. The purpose of the study is to describe structural, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of interlingual duplicating combinations in the speech of two children who acquire Russian and English simultaneously, as well as to find the correlation between their duplications and the development of their bilingualism. The results of the study can be used for the description of childhood bilingualism and the evaluation of bilingual children’s communicative competence in each of their languages and their interpreting abilities at various age stages.