Abstract
Code-switching (CS) is a common phenomenon among bilinguals, and many see it as a communication strategy from the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic point of view. This chapter attempts to examine this phenomenon in Mandarin communication of the sampled children, by comparing their language data against their different home language backgrounds. More specifically, this chapter aims to uncover the overall frequency of CS among the children, the types of CS they produce and the common linguistic elements that they often code-switch. Upon analysis, some statistically significant differences among the four home language groups were found in terms of their code-switching (CS) frequency, types of CS , types of intra-utterance CS , and the common content being code-switched . Negative correlations were found between the frequencies of CS and inter-utterance CS and the increased Mandarin exposures (represented by the CEI of the SCSMC). These findings support the hypothesis that there are different intensities of employing CS (into English) as a communication strategy to maintain Mandarin communication among the children of different Mandarin exposures.
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Goh, H.H. (2017). Mandarin Competence Measured by Code-Switching Tendency. In: Mandarin Competence of Chinese-English Bilingual Preschoolers. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2225-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2225-8_7
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