Quay 2008 Trlinigual 2y.o. Conversation

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Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context

Suzanne Quay First Language 2008 28: 5 DOI: 10.1177/0142723707083557 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fla.sagepub.com/content/28/1/5
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Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com Vol 28(1): 533 (200802) DOI: 10.1177/0142723707083557
Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context

Suzanne Quay, International Christian University, Tokyo
ABSTRACT Family dinner conversations can serve as a medium for the mutual involvement of children and parents in language socialization. In this study, early pragmatic development in a trilingual child is addressed from the perspective of the language dynamics of a multilingual family. How young children learn to adjust their speech to their interlocutors can be seen clearly in the language choices and the mixing patterns of the trilingual two-year-old. The child selected language(s) not only from the language(s) spoken to her but also with attention to her interlocutors linguistic proficiencies and the language context in which she found herself along a monolingual to trilingual continuum. She shifted languages in family dinner conversations according to the norms established in the home. KEYWORDS Family conversations; language mixing; language mode; parental language modeling; pragmatic development; trilingualism
INTRODUCTION
Family dinner conversations, when children are in the company of both parents, often after a day apart, serve as a medium for the mutual involvement of children
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and parents in language socialization. In this study, early pragmatic development in a trilingual child is addressed with a focus on the language dynamics of a multilingual family and their language mixing. The term language mixing is used here neutrally to encompass any utterance or conversation containing features from more than one language. The trilingual child can provide a clear picture through the use of three distinct languages of how young children learn to adjust their speech to their interlocutors. By investigating the factors involved in language choice patterns in a multilingual and multifaceted context, we may be able to gain insight, in general, into how children develop pragmatic skills from daily conversations and, more specifically, into how a two-year-old child processes three languages, separately or in combination, to achieve pragmatic competence. A brief summary will be given of what we have learnt from bilingual studies, as well as studies of dinner conversations, in shaping childrens discourse skills. This paper will focus on a social-pragmatic approach to bilingualism rather than on more traditional approaches that examine whether bilingual children start out with one or two linguistic systems (as discussed in Deuchar & Quay, 2000). The notion of a language mode or situational continuum will be explored within the social-pragmatic approach in terms of the decisions a trilingual child must make, albeit unconsciously, as to which language to use, how much of other languages is needed and what combination of languages to produce when each parent has different combinations of languages and different linguistic abilities in each.
Pragmatic reasons for language mixing in bilingual children

Language mixing in cases of simultaneous bilingual acquisition is being viewed increasingly as reflecting the development of pragmatic competence on the road to gaining code-switching skills, rather than as a sign of linguistic confusion or lack of language differentiation. Goodz (1989, 1994), Lanza (1997, 2001), Mishina (1999) and Juan-Garau & Prez-Vidal (2001), for example, have all indicated that bilingual childrens language mixing can be attributed to parental input and to parental response patterns. Goodz (1989) found that even small amounts of parental mixing had an impact on childrens language choice because they occurred in interactions to attract attention, emphasize or discipline that were highly salient for the children. Parents accepted their childrens language mixing and mixed or switched languages themselves to maintain and encourage communication. Moreover, Lanza (1997, 2001) stresses that parental speech acts in response to childrens code-mixing can also encourage code-mixing if they create a bilingual context for the interaction. Her parental discourse framework has been used in analyses of a Japanese-English child aged 1;102;2 by Mishina (1999) and of a Catalan-English child aged 1;34;2 by Juan-Garau & Prez-Vidal (2001). Both studies found positive correlations between language mixing by the children and the frequency of mixing in the parental speech and the effects of parental negotiation patterns on language mixing, thus supporting the arguments of both Goodz (1989, 1994) and Lanza (1997, 2001). Nicoladis & Genesee (1998) did not find support for a relationship between parental style of
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response and childrens rates of code-mixing as suggested by Lanza (1997), but this may have been due to the pooling together of data from five subjects, which could have masked developmental patterns (see Lanza, 2001, for her response to the findings in Nicoladis & Genesee, 1998). They propose, however, that differences in sociolinguistic contexts children raised in a bilingual community as in their study of French-English two-year-olds in Montreal versus a monolingual community as in Lanzas study of an English-Norwegian two-year-old in Norway may have affected the results. Also, Nicoladis & Genesee (1998) suggest that children may not have understood the subtle implicatures involved in the parental strategies targeting the childrens language choice or may be limited in their ability to show their pragmatic sensitivity due to unequal proficiency in their two languages. Kppe (1996) also suggests that young bilingual children are able to make pragmatic judgments about the linguistic abilities of their interlocutors. She found that bilingual children as young as two years used flagged switching that is, they accompanied their switches with pauses, hesitation, repetition, metalinguistic commentary or other attention-getting behavior to show that they knew they were not using the appropriate language of the interaction when they code-mixed.
Lexical gaps, dominance and learner strategy as reasons for language mixing
Since children who are exposed to a different language from each parent do not have duplicate experiences with both parents, it is not surprising, according to Goodz (1994: 67), that they may need to borrow or switch to a parents non-native language in order to fill in gaps in their vocabulary knowledge even when they are aware of the differences in language systems. Quay (1995) investigated systematically the lack of translation equivalents as well as lexical gaps in the language choice of a Spanish-English bilingual-to-be infant before age 1;10 and noted that insufficient lexical resources did indeed contribute to early mixing. Nicoladis & Secco (2000) also found this to be true for about 90% of a Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingual boys code-mixing between ages 1;0 and 1;6. Vihman (1985) and Lanza (1997) have both discussed the mixing of function words or closed-class items in terms of grammatical mixing. Lanza (1997) explains that such mixing occurs when grammatical elements of the dominant language are carried over to the weaker language (also known as the dominant language hypothesis). In other words, more language mixing occurs in bilingual children who are strongly dominant in one language when they speak their weaker language. Such children code-mix more when conversing with the parent who speaks their non-dominant language than with the one who speaks their dominant one whether or not the parent code-mixes in return (Genesee, Nicoladis & Paradis, 1995; Nicoladis & Genesee, 1998; Nicoladis & Secco, 2000). Serratrice (2005) even proposes that language mixing may be a sign of a creative learning strategy as opposed to a conservative one. Children who mix languages may be less input-dependent in the way they construct their multiword utterances while children who do not mix languages may be conservative learners. This would account for individual variation in early language choice.
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Parental language modeling

While many bilingual families follow a language policy like the one-parent-onelanguage approach to raise bilingual children, Noguchi (1996) suggests that strict or rigid adherence appears to impede communication particularly in school-aged children. Parental code-switching and some mixing of the languages are considered to be the most natural contexts for bilingual acquisition, and parents are advised consciously to help their children bridge the gap between two divergent languages and cultures through systematic modeling of, and promotion of the development of, both of their languages (Noguchi, 1996: 254). Nicoladis & Secco (2000) found, moreover, that parents would code-mix in order to use words they knew were in their childs productive vocabulary. Comeau, Genesee & Lapaquette (2003) tested what they called the modeling hypothesis which assumes that bilingual children are sensitive to code-mixing in the input and will adjust their own rates of code-mixing in accordance with the input, and found in a study of six French-English bilingual children (average age 2;4) that these children were able to adjust their rates of mixing in interactions with bilingual strangers who manipulated their output to vary their rates of mixing across three sessions, from relatively low to relatively high and back to relatively low. In another study, even though both parents only modeled the minority language, Estonian, in the home, Vihman (1998) considered it natural nevertheless for bilingual siblings (from ages 2;8 to 9;10) who shared experiences in each of their languages, English and Estonian, to make use of their two languages when talking together in the home. Vihman (1998: 75) suggests that code-switching is possible only when both linguistic maturation and the appropriate pragmatic conditions are present and that it served to help the two siblings to maintain active access to both languages.
Dinner conversations as lessons in linguistic and cultural socialization: A social-pragmatic approach

Similarly, Blum-Kulka (1997: 228) has shown that bilingual discourse at the dinner table actually promoted bilingualism for the children in American Israeli families (most of the children being between 6 and 13 years of age). The families would speak Hebrew, English and a hybrid language variety referred to as Hebrish around the dinner table. Code switching in these cases was geared towards the maintenance of English even though Hebrew was the dominant language of the children, many of whom were born in Israel. Thus, Blum-Kulka (1997: 258) concludes that [f]amilies constitute themselves through eating together, through conversing at dinner, and through using a bilingual style peculiar to themselves, a style that becomes one of the resources for claiming membership in the family. Bilingual language practices help family members to negotiate their social identities within the family and in the wider community and serve in this case to maintain the families bilingual language proficiency as it does for the two siblings in Vihmans (1998) study. Dinner conversations in general provide not only a shared speech event with a regular structure but also the pragmatic context for children to be socialized into appropriate language and cultural behavior. Blum-Kulka (1997) discusses in detail
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how family dinners are a communicative event that is suitable for the analysis of spontaneous family discourse, as social and discourse roles can be observed in the general organizational principles of dinner talk. Her own study consists of the dinner talk of 34 families with school-age children in the USA and Israel. Blum-Kulka (1997: 66) found that parents at dinner facilitate childrens language development in both direct and indirect ways. Direct ways were strategies that encouraged children to initiate their own topics, that gave them floor space and that helped them to elaborate topics of their own choice or topics initiated by adults. Indirect practices occurred when parents exposed children to adult topics, gave them the opportunity to listen to conversations that did not immediately concern them and accepted their children as equal co-participants when they weaved childrens contributions into the normal flow of conversations. The role of dinner talk for sociability, which tries to acculturate to the dominant culture, and for socialization, which tries to preserve cultural heritage as presented by Blum-Kulka (1997), is extended by Pontecorvo, Fasulo & Sterponi (2001) who discuss the notion that parents and children are mutually involved in socializing each other in family dinner conversations. Pontecorvo et al. (2001) studied 20 families with at least one child between 3 and 6 years of age and an older sibling in three Italian cities. They conclude that parental action and childrens participation cannot be considered to be separable elements in the process of socialization. The children they studied shaped the parental role, engaging the adults in the process of becoming competent members of a social group as parents, as much as parents engaged children in the process of becoming competent members of their linguistic and cultural group. Lanza (2001: 222223) also looked briefly at dinner table conversations involving triadic interactions for her Norwegian-English bilingual child, Siri. She found that triadic or multiparty interactions revealed a difference in the English-speaking mothers strategies from dyadic interactions where the mother usually negotiated a monolingual context with her daughter by not showing any comprehension of the childs inappropriate language choice. When the Norwegian-speaking father was present, the mother would reveal her bilingual identity by allowing the father to follow up on Norwegian utterances produced by the child, by providing English equivalents for Norwegian items, and by serving as an interpreter for the child when the father did not understand. In the last case, she would even repeat the childs utterance in Norwegian. Thus, Lanza (2001) concludes that it is important to investigate both dyadic and triadic interactions, or the participation framework of the conversation, for a more differentiated picture of language socialization in the home. All these studies show that dinner conversations can serve as a specific context for discussions of language choice. As such, dinnertime provides a recurrent situation where young children can use their powerful skills of social cognition as described by Tomasello (2001: 136) to learn linguistic conventions in the flow of social interaction. Tomasello (2001) believes that in this social-pragmatic view, childrens ability to perceive the intentions of others is the very foundation on which language acquisition is built. In multilingual interactions, parental use of different languages with the child and with each other is an indication to the child: (1) of appropriate language choice, (2) of the cultural specificity of language choice (which Tomasello mentions as scripts,
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routines, social games and other patterned cultural interactions), (3) of multilingual identities within the family (see also Blum-Kulka, 1997), and (4) of shifting transidiomatic conventions (language mixing patterns) within the family which the child must tune into and participate in. In the social-pragmatic view advocated by Tomasello (2001: 135), young children are seen to be engaged in social interactions in which they are attempting to understand and interpret adult communicative intentions. Children thus acquire their linguistic repertoire in much the same way as they learn many other cultural conventions, as a kind of by-product of meaningful communicative interactions with adults.
The importance of language modes in language acquisition and pragmatic development

For the multilingual child, it is also necessary to consider the different degrees of activation of this linguistic repertoire within particular participation frameworks of conversation (as in dyadic versus triadic). Grosjean (2001: 6) has introduced the concept of the bilinguals language mode continuum with regard to such activation as being akin to changing speech style or register based on the context and the interlocutor. The language mode is the state of activation of the bilinguals languages and language processing mechanisms, at a given point in time (Grosjean, 2001: 2). Factors such as the language proficiency, language mixing habits and attitudes, usual mode of interaction, or kinship relation of participants (the person(s) being spoken or listened to) as well as the situation (physical location, presence of monolinguals, degree of formality or intimacy), the form and content of the message spoken or heard (language used, topic, amount of mixed language) and the language act (to communicate information, to request something, to exclude someone, etc.) all affect the situational continuum ranging from a monolingual to a bilingual speech mode that a bilingual can be faced with. In the monolingual speech mode, the bilingual will deactivate one language (though not totally) and in the bilingual mode, the speaker chooses a base language and activates the other language from time to time in the form of code-switches and borrowings. According to Grosjean (2001: 4), the base language can change (from A to B) but not the comparative level of activation of the two languages (still in a bilingual mode), or the comparative level of activation of the two languages can change (from a bilingual to a monolingual mode) but the base language stays the same. A bilingual mode can arise when a bilingual child is interacting with a bilingual parent/adult or when listening to a conversation that contains elements from the other language. An intermediate language mode may occur if the bilingual child is faced with an interlocutor who is not very proficient in the other language (but still knows it a bit), if the interlocutor does not like to mix languages, if talking about a topic usually discussed in the other language, and so on. In the intermediate mode, there may be more examples of code-switching and borrowing than in the monolingual mode, some flagged switches, and some involvement of the other language during perception as well as production. Since movement along the continuum depending on the factors mentioned can occur at any given point in time and is done unconsciously, it is comparable to style or register shifts in monolinguals and can serve pragmatic functions. Grosjean (2001) calls on researchers to take into account language mode in
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studies of language mixing in bilingual children (among other topics) as it can be a confounding variable in understanding and explaining language behavior in bilingual children. The parental discourse strategies used by the bilingual parents in Lanza (1997) such as the Minimal grasp and Expressed grasp are comparable to the monolingual end, while Move on and Code-switching strategies are at the bilingual end of the language mode continuum. Grosjean (2001: 12) concludes that in terms of language mode, children are more in a monolingual mode with parents who do not mix language much (all other things being equal) whereas they are more in a bilingual mode with parents who mix languages to a greater extent (or at least accept language mixing). Muysken (2000) discusses the issue of different degrees of activation of ones linguistic repertoire according to three patterns of intra-sentential code-mixing: (1) alternation, which occurs when one language is replaced by another halfway through the sentence and is associated with a greater separateness of the two languages; (2) insertion, which occurs when individual lexical items or entire constituents from one language are inserted into the structure from the other language, and is considered to be similar to borrowing with primacy of one language over the other; and (3) congruent lexicalization, which occurs when material from different lexical inventories is placed into a shared grammatical structure (this would apply only to languages that share similar syntactic structures). In the case of alternation, activation would shift from one language to another, while in the case of insertion, activation in one language would be temporarily diminished. For congruent lexicalization, the two languages partially share their processing systems. The choice between these different processes is determined by factors similar to those mentioned by Grosjean (above), with the addition of structural factors (whether languages are typologically similar or not). Muysken (2000: 252) also argues that in many cases at least of insertion and congruent lexicalization, components of the two languages are not active in sequence, but simultaneously. This is in fact similar to the bilingual mode of speech production proposed by Grosjean, where both languages are active at the same time during code-mixing. Grosjean (2001: 17) also proposes that further research on language mode needs to be done for people who use three (or more) languages in their daily lives, as we can imagine a trilingual in a monolingual, a bilingual or a trilingual mode. In the monolingual mode, language A is active but the other two languages are only very slightly active. In the bilingual mode, language A remains the base language with language B also active (but to a lesser degree than language A) and language C is only very slightly active. The same trilingual in a trilingual mode would have language A as the base language and languages B and C also active. Unfortunately, Grosjean (2001) does not give any further explanation beyond that for the trilingual language mode.
Multilingual conversations
Up to this point, all the literature reviewed has pertained to bilingual studies. Hoffmann (2001) points out that much of the work on trilingualism has been done within the framework of bilingual studies, as does Quay (2001) who also laments that there are few systematic studies of early trilingual acquisition; for a review of the available
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trilingual studies, see Quay, 2001. Obviously, a quantitative difference exists between bilingualism and trilingualism which must be taken into account. When two languages are involved, a child has three choices: speak language A, speak language B, or speak a combination of A and B in a single utterance. When three languages are available, the child now has seven choices: language A, language B, language C, or a combination of two of the languages such as AB, AC or BC, or a combination of all three languages, ABC (Hoffmann, 2001). Notwithstanding the increased patterns of language choice, a higher degree of complexity also arises in the trilingual case in terms of social, cultural, psychological and personality-related factors. The present study investigates the family dinner conversations of a two-year-old girl who has been exposed to two languages from birth and a third language from five months of age onwards. At the age of 1;10 when this study began, it was clear that the child changed her way of speaking when with monolinguals at her daycare center and when with her bilingual father and trilingual mother. How does the presence of parents with different native languages affect a trilingual childs language choice in interactions with one or both at the same time? Since conversational exchanges at the dinner table are not only for the childs benefit, parents with different native languages may also be using different language patterns with each other than with their child. How do parent-child and parent-parent conversations at the dinner table encourage the choice of codes for the child who is faced with such a multilingual context? In the following sections, the spontaneous speech data of all three family members are described and analyzed in terms of language choice and language mixing.
METHOD
The family and their language strategy
The family in this study used the one-parent-one-language approach as a framework for their language choice while living in a third language environment in Tokyo, Japan. The mother spoke Chinese to her daughter, Xiaoxiao, from birth while the father spoke English. The child entered a Japanese daycare center at age 0;5 and attended this daycare on weekdays for 7 hours/day until 1;5 and for 8.5 hours/day from 1;5 until the end of this study at 2;4. Both parents are academics with doctoral degrees. The trilingual mother is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker with native-like fluency in Japanese. She is also very fluent in English, the predominant language she uses with her husband. The mother also speaks the Szechuan dialect of Chinese and understands Cantonese. The bilingual father is an American English speaker who is very fluent in Japanese and knows a little Chinese, Spanish and German. The child spent about 4 weeks in total in the USA around ages 0;3 and 1;2 and about the same amount of time in China at ages 1;3 to 1;4. The parents estimated that the child heard English from about 15% of her input and Chinese from about 85% of her input from birth to age 0;5. From 0;5 until the end of the study (nearly 2;5), English was heard from about 20% of the input, while Chinese and Japanese were each heard equally from about 40% of her total input.
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In this particular case, the parents each spoke their native language to their child who was learning a third language from the environment. In the presence of monolingual speakers of the community language, the parents spoke the community language (Japanese in this case) and in doing so, they modeled bilingual or trilingual behavior when switching languages according to interlocutors, context, topics and social needs. The father added that he did not always realize which language he was using. For example, he used Japanese even with his own American parents who did not speak Japanese. Although he knew that he code-mixed, he was not aware of it when he was actually code-mixing. The mother stated that she rarely code-mixed with her daughter.
Data collection
Dinner conversations were video-recorded each week by the parents for approximately 30 minutes from the time the child was aged 1;10.17 until she was 2;4.18. A total of 17 sessions involving the whole family at dinnertime were made (see Table 1 for a list of sessions with corresponding ages). Recordings were not done on a weekly basis when the family was away on holiday (age 1;11.82;0.6) and when the video camera malfunctioned around age 2;1.16. Recordings did not resume until a month later with a new digital video camera. The camera was left on a tripod pointing at the dinner table. Three additional sessions exist between ages 2;0.20 and 2;1.3 that involve just the mother and daughter as the father was away for 3 weeks. These 20 sessions are used to determine whether there was any difference in language patterns when the child was exposed to one parent speaking predominantly one language rather than two parents each speaking a different language with her at the dinner table.
Transcription and coding

The video-recordings were transcribed and coded in the CHAT format of CHILDES, and quantitative analyses were conducted by CLAN (MacWhinney, 1995). All the comprehensible utterances were classified in terms of the language of the utterance as Chinese (C), English (E) or Japanese (J). Combinations of any of the languages in the same utterance were coded as Mixed (M). To identify the language combinations, language tags such as @e for English, @c for Chinese and @j for Japanese were attached to the words within the mixed utterance. All the childs utterances were also coded according to the language of the preceding adult utterance. It became apparent that the possible patterns of child responses expanded depending on the number of input languages heard in a session. In the three sessions with the mother alone, there were only eight possible patterns as the mother only spoke Chinese or had a few code-mixed utterances with Chinese as the main language. Each of the childs utterances could be coded as: CC JC EC MC Chinese [response] to [preceding] Chinese Japanese to Chinese English to Chinese Mixed to Chinese CM Chinese to Mixed JM Japanese to Mixed EM English to Mixed MM Mixed to Mixed
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In the 17 sessions with the father and mother, the childs responses doubled to 16 possible patterns: EE EC EJ EM CE CC CJ CM English [response] to [preceding] English English to Chinese English to Japanese English to Mixed Chinese to English Chinese to Chinese Chinese to Japanese Chinese to Mixed JE Japanese to English JC Japanese to Chinese JJ Japanese to Japanese JM Japanese to Mixed ME Mixed to English MC Mixed to Chinese MJ Mixed to Japanese MM Mixed to Mixed
Each parents utterance was coded for language and addressee (to whom it was directed), X for Xiaoxiao, T for the mother and F for the father. The childs utterances were also coded for addressee, with T for the mother, F for the father and TF to indicate both parents. In a few rare cases, both parents utterances were coded as R for exact repetitions of Xiaoxiaos mixed utterances. Unintelligible and neutral utterances (onomatopoeic expressions or utterances that could belong to any language) were excluded from all calculations and analyses.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Contributions to dinner talk
In the17 family sessions, the child produced a total of 3311 utterances, her mother 3891 utterances, and her father 4914 utterances. The number of utterances produced by the child was lower than for the parents (note that only utterances which could be clearly coded for language were used in later analyses). When both parents were present, there was a tendency for the adults to talk to each other, mostly in English, about the days events, which limited the child from taking more conversational turns. The adults would also talk about work-related matters or about people they knew and what they said or did, and the father had a tendency to repeat other peoples speech in the original Japanese source language. When they spoke to their daughter, they used their respective native languages. The topics raised in the conversations with the child were invariably about food, proper table manners, proper behavior in general, and what happened at the daycare center or on the way home. The average length of the childs utterances in all 17 sessions was less than half that for each of the parents at 2.17 words in contrast to the mothers average of 5.00 words/utterance and the fathers average of 5.16 words/utterance. Cultural-specificity of language choice: Japanese routines at the dinner table Dinner conversations were framed by routine utterances in Japanese to announce the start and the end of meals. The Japanese utterances served as an example of the role of dinner talk for sociability (which tries to acculturate to the dominant culture in this case, that of the Japanese community) as introduced by Blum-Kulka (1997). The Japanese utterances were probably used because no such set utterances are always
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spoken before and after a meal in English or Chinese. Itadakimasu was said at the beginning of meals, roughly meaning I humbly receive the meal to thank the cook or the host; no religious significance was tied to this statement unlike saying grace. Gochisousama deshita (or a shortened version of this utterance, gochisou or gochisousama), said at the end of a meal, roughly meant thank you for the meal [that I have finished]. Both parents used the Japanese expressions to train their child in such linguistic and cultural behavior, as can be seen in example 1 with Japanese and Chinese utterances shown in italics (the transcript follows CHILDES conventions but not its format of having only one utterance for each line; the format has been condensed in this paper to save space). (1) from Session 10, age 2;2.23 Xiaoxiao you dont have to finish it all, but if you wanna Xiaoxiao you all done? mommy you are done? did you say gochisousama mommy? *MOT: yes. *FAT: daddy said gochisousama. Xiaoxiao do you want to say gochisousama? %eng: daddy said thank you for the meal. Xiaoxiao do you want to say thank you for the meal you have finished *XIA: no. *FAT: wei shen me? %eng: why Example 1 shows not only how the father is trying to socialize the child into saying the correct Japanese utterance at the end of the meal by using the mother and himself as models, but also how he switches easily into a Chinese utterance, wei shen me (although he has limited Chinese ability), to ask why the child wont say gochisousama, a Japanese utterance that he inserts into otherwise English utterances. Thus, it is clear even from such a small example that the child is in a trilingual context as triggered by the formulaic Japanese utterances used to open and close their meals. The intention of the parents appears to be to socialize the child in the appropriate cultural script of their community, which is important considering the amount of time that the child spends in a Japanese daycare center each day. Table 1 shows how frequently each member of the family produces the routine utterances, itadakimasu and gochisousama. No one produced itadakimasu in the first 7 sessions and the last one, except the father in Session 1. In Sessions 814, one or both parents produced it at least once, and finally Xiaoxiao appeared to do so without any or little prompting from her parents from age 2;3.26 onwards (Sessions 1416). One or both parents consistently produced gochisousama except in Sessions 7 and 9. Xiaoxiao did not consistently produce gochisousama until age 2;2.23 (Session 10) and onwards. The importance of Table 1 is to show that opening and closing dinner conversations with Japanese expressions may make the language more salient for the child. Assuming that the child is not aware that Japanese expressions are used because there are no equivalent English or Chinese utterances, she may be led to believe that Japanese is an appropriate language to use at the dinner table, even with a mother who speaks predominantly in Chinese to her and a father
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Table 1 The frequency of routine Japanese expressions in dinner conversations
Session
Age XIA
Itadakimasu FAT 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 MOT 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 XIA 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 3 1 3 2 2
Gochisousama FAT 1 4 8 1 1 2 0 1 0 9 3 0 2 1 1 1 0 MOT 1 0 4 0 2 3 0 2 0 2 2 2 1 2 0 0 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
1;10.17 1;10.24 1;11.1 1;11.8 2;0.6 2;0.13 2;1.9 2;1.16 2;2.15 2;2.23 2;2.28 2;3.4 2;3.11 2;3.26 2;4.5 2;4.11 2;4.18
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 2 1 1 0
who speaks predominantly in English to her. Thus, the processing of such interactions serves to reinforce the childs perception and comprehension of adult intentions with regard to appropriate linguistic and cultural behavior (see Tomasello, 2001).
Language choices in dinner conversations

Parental report versus actual language use The parents were interviewed at the beginning of the study when the child was 1;10 and again at the end of the study when she was 2;4. They reported at both times that their daughters language proficiency from strongest to weakest was: (1) Japanese, (2) Chinese, (3) English. The child had the opportunity to speak English only with the father and Chinese only with the mother in the home context. The child spoke Japanese at the daycare center and also at home, since her parents would respond to her Japanese utterances and sometimes repeated them. Often, the parents would continue to use their respective languages even when the child spoke Japanese (i.e., Lanzas Move-on Strategy). The mother reported (as shown in the second upper lefthand column of Table 2) that with her daughter she used Chinese in 90% of her utterances directed to the child, English in 8% of her utterances when the father was around, and Japanese in 2% of her utterances when the mother knew that her daughter did not have the vocabulary in Chinese (see Nicoladis & Secco, 2000) or
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when with monolingual Japanese speakers. She addressed the father in English in 80% of her utterances and in Japanese in 20% of them. In rare cases when the child was there, she would repeat statements in Chinese to the father. The father reported that he used English in 85% of his utterances with his daughter and Japanese in 15% of them (as shown in the second lower left-hand column of Table 2). He used English in 60% of his utterances with the mother and Japanese in 40% of them. Table 2 compares the parental report with their actual language use in the videorecordings. The percentages calculated in the table are based on all 17 sessions of the family at dinnertime. The mothers report about her speech to Xiaoxiao and to the father was accurate in terms of her general tendency to speak predominantly Chinese in more than 90% of all utterances directed to her daughter and English in more than 80% of all utterances directed to her husband. She spoke less English to Xiaoxiao than she reported and less Japanese except in mixed utterances. She also spoke less Japanese to her husband than she reported, except in mixed utterances that were a combination of English and Japanese. The father spoke English in 90% of all his utterances directed to Xiaoxiao, i.e., more than he reported. He spoke a lot less Japanese than he thought to his daughter but he did produce mixed utterances that were combinations of English and Japanese. He even spoke a little Chinese (2% of his utterances) to his daughter although he claimed that his level of Chinese was at the two-year-old level (but note that the father did code-switch into Chinese in example 1). He spoke English in 85% of his utterances with his wife; the remaining 15% of his utterances involved either Japanese utterances alone or a combination of predominantly English and Japanese in mixed utterances. In sum, both parents overestimated their use of Japanese and used mixed utterances to each other and to the child although they had both reported that they did not codemix within utterances. Goodz (1989) also found that parents were usually not Table 2 Comparison of parental report of percentage language use with videorecorded sessions
Language to XIA MOT Chinese English Japanese Mixed FAT Chinese English Japanese Mixed
Parental report to MOT to FAT
17 video-recorded family sessions to XIA to MOT to FAT
90 8 2 0 0 85 15 0 0 60 40 0
0 80 20 0
92 3 1 4 2 90 4 4 0 85 7 8
4 84 3 9
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aware that they code-mixed with their children. As reported, the father did address the child mainly in English and the mother addressed her mainly in Chinese, but the child could overhear parental conversations in English and Japanese and was thus exposed to a trilingual environment in the home from a trilingual mother and a bilingual father. Childs language use in comparison with parental language use Figure 1 shows the distribution of Xiaoxiaos percentage language use to each parent and to both together in all 17 family sessions. The childs language use was quite different from that of her parents (shown in Table 2). Both parents used Japanese minimally although the father did use it more than the mother and both code-mixed less to the child (4% of all utterances) than to each other (89% of all utterances). Figure 1 shows, however, that in spite of her mothers consistent use of Chinese in more than 90% of her utterances, the child produced Chinese in only 37% of her utterances (based on 1422 total utterances directed to her mother). She did, however, produce more Chinese than English (18.5% of her utterances), Japanese (26.5%) and mixed utterances (18%) to her mother. Figure 1 also shows that in spite of her fathers consistent usage of English with her and her mother, there is also much variation in her language choice with him. She did produce English in 45% of her utterances (based on 884 total utterances directed to her father), which was higher than her production of Chinese with her mother; she produced Chinese the least often to her Japanese-English-speaking father. Her rate of Japanese production was slightly higher with her father (29%) than with her mother (26.5%). Most interesting is the fact that 67% of all utterances (N 60) directed to both parents at the same time were in Japanese, which was not only her dominant language and the language of her environment outside the home, but was also the language other than English that both parents shared. When addressing both parents together, English was used the next most often, in 23% of her utterances. The childs language mixing within utterances
70 Percentage of utterances 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 MOT Chinese English FAT Addressee Japanese Both Mixed
Figure 1 XIAs language use to her mother (MOT), to her father (FAT) and to both parents in 17 family sessions
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to each parent was higher than their mixing to her. Xiaoxiao code-mixed in 18% of her utterances when addressing her mother and in 16% when addressing her father. Her code-mixing was low at 3% when addressing both parents at the same time. In Fig. 2, the child is interacting only with her mother in the three sessions recorded when the father was away from home; it shows that the mother used mainly Chinese (95% of all utterances, N 831) with hardly any English (0.1%) or Japanese (1%) utterances and a minimal amount of mixed utterances (4%). The child produced more Chinese in these sessions (44% of all utterances, N 560) than in the family sessions shown in Fig. 1 when her father was also present. Her production of English at 10% in the three mother-child sessions is much lower than her English usage in the triadic interactions shown in Fig. 1, but her production of Japanese (23% of her utterances) is nearly as high as in the family sessions. Figures 1 and 2 show that the child does speak more of the language that each parent uses with her. This is in spite of her dominance or preference for her third language, Japanese, that she uses with peers and caregivers on a daily basis in the daycare center. The fact that the childs strongest language is the community language indicates that early peer socialization in contrast to parental socialization has a relatively strong influence over language use (Harris, 1995). The same was found in Quay (2001) for a trilingual infant, Freddy, from age 1;1 to 1;10 who showed a preference for Japanese, the language of his daycare center, than for the languages of his American mother and German father. In that case, as in the current one, both families reside in Japan. Both sets of parents acknowledge their childrens Japanese output as a valid and worthy contribution to family conversations. The children, in turn, from their interactions outside the home must have reached some level of awareness that more interlocutors speak the L3 than the parental L1 and L2, and that their own parents also sometimes speak the L3. Also, some of their interlocutors in the daycare environment share socially relevant characteristics with them such as age, gender, abilities and interests that would promote the learning of the L3 outside of the home (Harris, 1995).
900 800 700 No. utterances 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 English Mixed English Japanese Japanese Chinese Chinese Mixed
XIA to MOT
MOT to XIA
Figure 2 Language choice in three mother-child sessions (age 2;0.202;1.3)

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Xiaoxiaos preference for Japanese comes out particularly when she addresses both parents together. It may serve almost like a lingua franca for the child when she needs to talk to both parents at the same time, because her parents not only have this language in common but also are both willing to use Japanese with her unlike English which only the father uses with her and Chinese which only the mother uses with her. In terms of the language mode continuum, the child is in a trilingual mode in both the triadic and dyadic context, but to a much lesser degree in the dyadic context. Grosjeans (2001) description of the trilingual mode does not actually do justice to the complexity of the situation for the child. Figure 1 shows that the child changes base language three times. When she interacts with her mother, her base language is obviously Chinese, but Japanese and English are also active with English only slightly less active than Japanese. When she interacts with her father, her base language is obviously English, with Japanese and Chinese also active. But this time, Japanese is much more active than Chinese, so the child seems to be more at an intermediate node on the continuum between a bilingual and trilingual language mode with her father. In either case, the child must be aware of the presence of the other parent at the dinner table. When the child addresses both parents together, Japanese becomes her base language and, although both English and Chinese are also active, she seems to deactivate the use of Chinese so that it is again the least active of her three languages. It makes sense that she is at an intermediate language mode when her bilingual father is involved in their conversations, as the child seems to be aware that her father has limited Chinese proficiency. When her father is not present at all (Fig. 2), her Chinese usage is much more in evidence and her English usage decreases or is deactivated to a larger degree than when her father is present. In the three mother-child sessions, Chinese is obviously her base language. Her mother speaks almost exclusively in Chinese to her, but the child must be aware of her mothers trilingual abilities as Japanese and English are still active (with Mixed utterances also occurring), but since English is much less active than Japanese, she is closer to but not exactly in Grosjeans bilingual mode in this case (described as language A being the base language with language B less active than language A and language C only very slightly active).
Language mixing of the trilingual child and her parents

Turning now specifically to mixed utterances, what can their language combinations tell us about the familys language choice patterns? Figures 3, 4 and 5 show the mixed utterances separated according to language combinations for the child (XIA), the mother (MOT) and the father (FAT), respectively E/J for English-Japanese utterances, E/C for English-Chinese, J/C for JapaneseChinese and E/J/C for utterances involving all three languages. Note that no fixed order is implied in the language combinations and that the terms mixed utterances and language mixing are used here descriptively to indicate two or more languages within the same utterance turn rather than within a conversation. Figure 3 presents the language combinations of the childs mixed utterances to her father and mother. The child clearly differentiated between the language proficiencies of each parent even in her language mixing. Whereas all three languages were
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No. utterances in 17 sessions 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 E/J E/C FAT J/C E/J/C E/J E/C MOT J/C E/J/C Addressee
Figure 3 Language combinations of XIAs mixed utterances to each parent (each language indicated by its first letter)
80 70 No. utterances in 17 sessions 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 E/J E/C FAT Addressee J/C E/J/C E/J E/C XIA J/C E/J/C
Figure 4 Language combination of MOTs mixed utterances to FAT and XIA (each language indicated by its first letter)
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
No. utterances in 17 sessions
E/J
E/C J/C MOT
E/J/C
E/J
E/C XIA
J/C
E/J/C
Addressee
Figure 5 Language combinations of FATs mixed utterances to MOT and XIA (each language indicated by its first letter)
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combined almost equally in all possible dual-language patterns, as well as in triadiclanguage combinations, in utterances directed at the mother, the same pattern did not occur with the father. Excluding the utterances involving all three languages (E/J/C), the child produced dual language combinations (E/J, E/C and J/C) on average in 30% of all her mixed utterances for each combination with her mother. She produced mainly English and Japanese mixed utterances (65% of all her mixed utterances) in conversations with her father, thus showing her awareness that those were the two languages that her father could handle best. More mixed utterances involving all three languages were directed to the trilingual mother (N 19) than to the bilingual father (N 7). Figure 3 indicates that the child may be in more of a bilingual language mode with her father, while clearly in a trilingual mode with her mother. One explanation of child bilingual code-mixing discussed above is that young bilingual children mix more when they use their less proficient language (Genesee et al., 1995; Nicoladis & Genesee, 1998; Nicoladis & Secco, 2000). Although English is considered to be Xiaoxiaos least proficient language, she produced 143 mixed utterances while speaking to her English-speaking father as compared with 256 mixed utterances while speaking to her Chinese-speaking mother. Thus, more mixed utterances were directed to the mother than to the father (Fig. 3). However, Fig. 1 shows a smaller difference in terms of the proportion of mixed utterances out of the total utterances directed to each parent. The child produced 16% mixed utterances when conversing with the father and 18% mixed utterances when talking to her mother. Surprisingly, this trilingual child does not mix more when using her least proficient language as has been found with bilingual children. Thus, explanations used in bilingual cases do not always apply in trilingual ones. As mentioned earlier, social, cultural, psychological and personality-related factors become more complex when three languages are involved than with two. Figure 4 shows the language combinations of the mothers mixed utterances to the father and to the child. Two patterns are of particular note. First, like the results for the child, shown in Fig. 3, the mother predominantly produced English and Japanese mixed utterances (E/J) in her conversations with the father, and 82% of all her mixed utterances were of this type. Her one E/J/C utterance produced in Session 4 at age 1;11.8 was baba can we have more nori? (daddy can we have more seaweed?). Baba daddy is coded as Chinese and nori seaweed is coded as Japanese in an otherwise English utterance. Chinese insertions into mixed utterances directed at the father could be easily understood by the father. With her child, 70% of all the mothers mixed utterances contained Japanese and Chinese combinations. The mother in effect modeled for the child the appropriate language combinations to use with the father in her own mixed utterance usage. She also revealed (probably unintentionally and subconsciously) in her J/C mixed utterances to the child that it was okay for the child to use Japanese while speaking Chinese with the mother. Finally, Fig. 5 shows the language combinations of the fathers mixed utterances to the mother and to the child. With both interlocutors, the father produced mainly English and Japanese language combinations as would be expected from an EnglishJapanese bilingual. He also produced a small amount of English and Chinese mixed utterances with both the mother and the child, thus indicating that although he was not very proficient in Chinese, he did have a little knowledge of the language
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gained from listening to conversations between the mother and the child in the home. His language mixing patterns showed his willingness to produce and accept a small amount of Chinese in his family conversations. Types of language mixing Qualitatively speaking, mixed utterances involving Chinese directed to the father tended to be translation equivalents such as: ju zi juice (coded as E/C). Other mixed utterances involving Chinese insertions directed to the father were of the type easily understood by the father such as kore wa baba? (is this daddys?, coded as J/C) where the Chinese word baba was used by the mother when addressing the child to refer to the father. The father even told the mother in a session at age 2;0.13 that he understood what Xiaoxiao had said in Chinese, as shown in example 2 when the mother was urging the child to translate into English for the father what the child had said in Chinese about a piece of fruit. (2) from Session 6, age 2;0.13 *FAT: *XIA: %eng: *MOT: %eng *XIA: %eng: *MOT: %eng: *FAT: *MOT: yeah honey? ju ju. [mandarin] orange cai cai. vegetable hai you cai cai. and vegetable hai you cai cai. and vegetable ah! ju ju shi shen me, ni gao su baba. ju ju shi shen me ya? baba bu dong. ni gao su baba. %eng: what does ju ju mean, tell daddy. what does ju ju mean. daddy doesnt know. tell daddy *FAT: I know what it is. Xiaoxiao talked about it yesterday. By not waiting for a translation from his daughter, the father provided a pragmatic cue (Tomasello, 2001) that he could understand Chinese conversations even if he did not speak the language. From similar situations that occur throughout the data, the daughter comes to understand that the intention behind her fathers utterances is to let her know that she can use some Chinese utterances with him. In example 3, a mixed utterance involving all three languages was directed to both parents near the end of a game where the parents and the child had been taking turns naming the color of pens. The father would say the color of the pen such as black pen in English, and Xiaoxiao would repeat the English utterance as she picked out the correct colored pen, then the mother would say the same thing in Chinese (hei bi) and the child would repeat the Chinese utterance. (3) from Session 5, age 2;0.6 XIA: hong bi baba hong bi baba hong bi mommy@e hong bi yatta@j! %eng: red pen daddy red pen daddy red pen mommy red pen I did it
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In (3), the English and Japanese insertions are indicated (@e and @j) in the otherwise Chinese utterance. It is actually difficult to decide whether the childs base language is Chinese or not. It has been decided that it is Chinese only because of the higher number of Chinese elements in the utterance. Should it be Japanese because she uses an inflected Japanese verb yatta in her utterance? Does the use of the Japanese inflected verb indicate dominance in that language, as has been suggested by Lanza (1997) regarding the mixing of grammatical elements? Although such questions are beyond the scope of this paper, they have been raised to indicate the complexity of trilingual data and trilingualism as opposed to bilingualism. Mommy has been tagged as an English insertion because the child also used the Chinese term mama to refer to her mother. Xiaoxiao also used both the Chinese baba and the English daddy to refer to her father. The father always referred to the mother as mommy while the mother always referred to herself in Chinese as mama. Similarly, the mother referred to the father in Chinese as baba while he referred to himself as daddy. The parents have reported that shortly after the last videorecorded sessions around age 2;4, Xiaoxiao used the terms differentially by saying Mommy when talking to her father about her mother and Mama when calling her mother. She would say Daddy when calling her father and Baba when talking to her mother about her father. In the earlier session shown in example 3, there was a strong preference for using mommy in all language contexts, so that many of her mixed utterances involving English as one of the languages were of the type with mommy inserted. She also used the terms baba and daddy in what appeared to be a random fashion. The reason mama/mommy and baba/daddy have been treated differently from proper names is because, unlike other proper names, they could be categorized as belonging to one or the other language. Moreover, Xiaoxiao did eventually separate out the usage of the equivalent terms, indicating that these terms were not used in the same way as other proper names that were used in all language contexts. Almost all the mixed utterances by the parents and the child were mainly of the kind termed as lexical borrowings or insertions by Muysken (2000). A more detailed analysis of code-mixed data will be reserved for a future paper but, in general, mixed utterances tended to be noun rather than noun phrase insertions, and content rather than function words. Many of the childs mixes involving Japanese were also of the type where a Japanese name and title would be inserted such as sensei to refer to her daycare teachers. Culturally specific to Japanese, proper names, whether they are family names or first names, are followed by san (Mr/Mrs/Ms) or chan/kun for young female/male children. Such mixed insertions appeared to be appropriate when the child talked about people and events from her Japanese daycare center. The parents did the same by inserting Japanese proper names and titles and place names in their otherwise English or Chinese utterances. Common Japanese insertions also involved tag switching where the Japanese particles ne (roughly equivalent to isnt it?) and yo (emphatic marker) were used for emphasis in mixed utterances by both the child and her parents. These are culture-specific terms (much like the Japanese itadakimasu and gochisousama to signal the beginning and the end of meals, as discussed earlier) in that their use is more prevalent in Japanese than in English or Chinese, to ensure consensus between speakers and listeners. Language mixing also resulted sometimes from preference for certain terms such as the English words juice and cheese or the Japanese terms kocchi here or kore
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this in all language contexts. Example 4 from the earliest session recorded at age 1;10.17 shows how the childs use of kocchi triggered the fathers use of the Japanese word in subsequent turns. Although there is no space in this paper to discuss fully the interactional-sequential nature of the familys conversational practices, example 4 does give a brief glimpse as to how seamlessly interactions flow in the two parental languages. The father addressed the child in English and the child responded in Japanese as to where she wanted to sit. The father repeated her Japanese utterance but continued in English addressing both the child and the mother with his indirect request for the mother to move the chair. The mother then joined in, repeating twice in Chinese more or less what the father had said in English that she would move the chair for the child. The father reassured the child that the chair would be moved to the childs desired spot by repeating the Japanese utterance kocchi before confirming again in English that the mother would move the chair as indicated by the child. Before he could finish his second repetition of this confirmation, the mother repeatedly assured the child in Chinese that she was moving the chair the way the child wanted and asked whether her daughter was seated properly. The child replied negatively in Chinese. A short while later, the father tried to interest the child in a further conversational interaction. When she did not respond to his English questions, he produced the Japanese greeting moshi moshi (used when answering the phone) to attract her attention. But the mother distracted the child with more practical issues by telling her in Chinese that she needed to put an apron around the child before she started eating. The child initiated another topic by asking her mother what she was eating with the Japanese utterance kore, as in (what is) this? Instead of responding, the mother rephrased the question in Chinese and the child replied in Chinese that it was fish, to which the mother exclaimed in Chinese that she was correct. In this excerpt, the mother had consistently spoken only in Chinese to her daughter, as was her usual practice. The child continued the conversation in Chinese by telling her mother that the fish was hot, to which her mother agreed. Her father then jumped in showing that he had been able to follow this Chinese conversation by also agreeing in English that the fish was still hot and that his daughter should be careful. The child finally included the father in the conversation by uttering the English word, fish, which the father then repeated. The child thus managed to accommodate not only to two different parental languages but also to make her own contributions with her third language without disrupting the flow of interactions. The parents, in turn, demonstrated their multilingual abilities by showing comprehension of all linguistic interactions while staying within the parameters of their one-parent-one-language approach. (4) from Session 1, age 1;10.17 ([] indicates intervening utterances that have been omitted) *FAT: *XIA: %eng: *FAT: *MOT: %eng: *FAT: oh oh Xiaoxiao let me move your chair over here. careful. Xiaoxiao kocchi@j. Xiaoxiao here kocchi@j. well have mommy mommy will move it honey. mama bang ni ban. mama bang ni ban. mom will help you move the chair [2x] kocchi@j, mommy will move it honey. mommy will /.
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*MOT: mama bang ni ban. mama bang ni ban a, Xiaoxiao. mama bang ni ban hao. Xiaoxiao zuo hao le mei you? %eng: mom will help you move it. mom will move it for you ok, Xiaoxiao. mom will move it well for you. Xiaoxiao, are you sitting down well? %act: move and set the chair for XIA *XIA: mei you. %eng: not yet [] *FAT: is the juice good honey? is there anybody home? moshi-moshi@j? %eng: hello *MOT: Xiaoxiao mama xian gei ni dai shang wei qun jin zai chi hao ma? %eng: Xiaoxiao, mom wants to put the apron on you then eat ok *XIA: mommy@e kore@j. %eng: mommy this *MOT: zhe shi shen me? %eng: what is this *XIA: yu. %eng: fish *MOT: dui le! %eng: correct *XIA: yu tang tang? %eng: fish is hot *MOT: tang tang o. %eng: its hot *FAT: yeah the fish is still hot. honey careful. *XIA: fish. *FAT: fish. If we go beyond linguistic form and away from regarding mixed language usage as linguistic aberrations, the language produced can be seen as context related and context producing, as in (4). In fact, such utterances can be seen more positively as shifting trans-idiomatic conventions practiced by the family. Code-mixing is thus, as proposed by Blum-Kulka (1997), another way for the family to identify themselves as multicultural and multilingual with active access to various linguistic repertoires (Grosjean, 2001; Muysken, 2000). Jacquemet (2002) addresses this phenomenon of trans-idiomatic practices as one instance of the sociolinguistic effects of globalization processes. In this view, language resources are detached from their original community and space of use, to be deployed (often in a mediated form) elsewhere. Mixed language utterances in terms of trans-idiomatic practices can be acknowledged as the verbal repertoires of people engaging in a multitude of cultural and linguistic affiliations. As can be seen in this particular family, the parents are from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and are raising their daughter in a third culture and language environment. Their conversational interactions are a reflection of their family composition, circumstances, self-perception and positive attitudes towards multilingualism. Moreover, according to Muysken (2000), some bilingual studies have found that the use of intra-sentential and single word switches is a sign
26
of a high degree of bilingual proficiency thus again throwing a positive light on codemixing practices. Contextual sensitivity from the earliest sessions between ages 1;10.17 and 2;0.13 While not the focus of this article, it was found that the child spoke mainly Japanese in the monolingual daycare setting during the same age period as the family dinner sessions: 98.6% of all her utterances (N 696) in 14 daycare sessions from ages 2;0.13 to 2;4.12 were in Japanese; 1% (N 7) were in English; 0.4% mixed Japanese-English (N 3); and none in Chinese. Of the 7 English utterances produced in all 14 daycare sessions, 3 were in the first session at age 2;0.13: bicycle, soccerball and daddy. She did not produce any mixed utterances in the first daycare session. Except for the 3 English words mentioned, the rest of the first daycare session only contained Japanese utterances from the child, indicating that she was essentially in a monolingual language mode at the daycare center. When we compare her language use in the first daycare session at 2;0.13 with her language use in the first 6 family sessions leading up to the same age (see Fig. 6), we can see that she was already using her languages in a contextually sensitive way at age 2;0. In the monolingual daycare context, she was able to deactivate totally her Chinese ability and to deactivate almost totally her English as well. In the multilingual home context, she produced all three languages. Figure 6 shows that she produced more Chinese and English than Japanese in the first family session at age 1;10.17. Japanese utterances overtook the production of Chinese and English utterances in two early sessions at ages 1;11.1 and 1;11.8, but when we look at the total for all 6 sessions, we see that all three languages were used almost equally frequently. Xiaoxiaos production of Japanese utterances was relatively high, not only in the first 6 sessions shown in Fig. 6 but also across all 17 family sessions, probably because it was a preferred language that she used daily at her Japanese daycare
200
No. utterances
150
100
50
1;10.17 Chinese
1;10.24 English
1;11.1
1;11.8 Age Japanese Mixed
2;0.6
2;0.13
Total
Figure 6 XIAs language use in the first 6 sessions and in all 6 sessions from age 1;10.17 to 2;0.13
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center for roughly 8 hours each weekday and heard in 40% of her total input. Also, as mentioned earlier, the parents considered Japanese to be her strongest language. Moreover, 80% of the mixed utterances directed to the child by the Englishspeaking father (see Fig. 5) contained Japanese insertions, while 74% of the mixed utterances directed to the child by the Chinese-speaking mother (see Fig. 4) also contained Japanese insertions. But Fig. 1 shows us that she differentiated her languages according to her addressee. She produced more Chinese to her Chinese-speaking mother than her other two languages and more English to her English-speaking father than her other two languages. Japanese, however, was used the most frequently when she addressed both parents together. The results from the daycare sessions combined with Figs 1 and 6 clearly show that the child can differentiate her language use at the early age of 2;0. She can speak almost entirely in one language in the monolingual setting with very little code mixing and use her other two languages differentially, although they are weaker and less preferred than the community language she uses at her daycare center in the monolingual setting. This provides evidence that the child is using her languages in a contextually sensitive manner as she uses more of the parental languages than the community language at home in both triadic and dyadic interactions shown above in Figs 1 and 2, respectively.
Rule-governed language choice

Figures 7a and 7b show that the child answered almost half the time in the language in which she was addressed: 41% (EE CC JJ MM) of all utterances when both parents were present (Fig. 7a) and 45% (CC MM JJ) of all utterances when only the mother was there (Fig. 7b). She responded the second most frequently in Japanese to preceding English, Chinese and Mixed utterances (26% of utterances) addressed to her by both parents in the triadic conversations shown in Fig. 7a, and to Chinese and Mixed utterances (22%) addressed to her by her mother (Fig. 7b). She produced mixed utterances the third most frequently to English, Japanese and Chinese utterances (17% of utterances) in the triadic interactions in Fig. 7a and to Chinese utterances (21%) in the dyadic interactions in Fig. 7b. Finally, English was produced the least frequently in response to Chinese, Mixed and Japanese utterances (10% of utterances) in Fig. 7a and to Chinese utterances (10%) in Fig. 7b. Thus a pattern can be seen in both the triadic and dyadic interactions in Figs 7a and 7b, respectively. The subconscious rules she seems to follow are: (1) respond where possible in the same language as the one used by my interlocutor; (2) if I break Rule 1, then respond in my strongest language, Japanese; (3) if Rules 1 and 2 are not kept, respond in the combination of languages known by my interlocutors; and (4) if all else fails (Rules 1, 2 and 3 are not followed), respond in my weakest language, English. Since code-switching has been referred to as rule-governed language mixing by Kppe (1996), we can break down Rule 3 further into rules concerning the father versus those concerning the mother. With regard to the father, the child responds in English and Japanese where possible, as her fathers Chinese language ability is very limited. Although the father says his Chinese ability is at the level of a
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(a) (b)
Figure 7 The childs language choice according to the language used to address her (a) in 17 family interactions, and (b) in the three sessions with only her mother; language codes are given on pp. 1314
two-year-old, the child may have deemed it lower than her own ability. With regard to the mother, the child responds in any combination of her three languages because her mother knows all three languages well.
CONCLUSION
This study shows that a Chinese-English-Japanese trilingual child at age two selects language and languages according to her interlocutors linguistic knowledge in terms of their native language as well as the language they speak to her. The child also seems to be sensitive to the languages her parents speak within her hearing distance, even when not addressed to her. Observational evidence does exist in studies such as those by Brown (2001) and de Len (2001) that children in some of the worlds cultures even tune into the flow of social interaction between third parties and learn some linguistic conventions from their linguistic interactions (Tomasello, 2001: 154). In the present study, the father was essentially bilingual in English and Japanese while the mother was trilingual. The child even differentiated her language mixing according to her parents different language abilities and did not use much Chinese in her mixed utterances with her father except for simple Chinese expressions like baba which was used all the time by the mother to refer to the father. The family lived in a monolingual Japanese community but the parents created a trilingual home context for the child by using their native languages with her following the one-parent-one-language approach and by code-switching between English and the community language, Japanese, in conversations with each other. Just as has been found in bilingual studies, language choice is affected in early trilingualism not only by parental input directed at the child but also by parental
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language use to each other, by the familys acceptance of all three languages in the home and the childs sensitivity to her parents different linguistic proficiencies. In family dinner conversations, the child is able to judge her parents proficiency in her three languages and balance the use of her languages to suit contexts where she is dealing with one alone, or one in the company of the other or both of them at the same time. The results of the childs language choice patterns demonstrate quite sophisticated pragmatic abilities as early as age 1;10 when recordings began. Perhaps if we had started recording even earlier in the home and in the daycare center, we might have found that the child adjusted her speech to others at an even earlier age. The patterns of language choice and language use of all three family members have been shown to be more complex when three languages are involved. In spite of this additional complexity, the child demonstrates no confusion in her language choices. She adheres systematically to certain rules of linguistic behavior. These rules are formed from being socialized into family-specific language practices. The appearance of mixed utterances in parental speech to the child and to each other indicates the suitability of such behavior to the child. Parental models do not lead the child to conclude that a strict separation of languages is the best or the only way to communicate. Although the child received more Japanese and Chinese input than English, she still managed to use a fair amount of English to accommodate her fathers language use with her. Note that this is a major difference between the bilingual and trilingual situation as children are less likely to have equal exposure to three languages than to two and the amount of input from each language decreases as the number of languages increases. The child in this study nevertheless acquired English conversational skills. As mentioned earlier, she heard English from only 20% of the input she received in her daily environment. The fact that she could still use English predominantly with her father and did not mix more in her weakest language (as was found for bilingual children) implies that she received sufficient input even at one-fifth of her total input for the development and maintenance of her English skills. Perhaps a smaller quantity of input can be overcome by qualitative factors. The child had a close relationship with her father and this intimate bond may have also promoted the use of English with her father. The childs personality was undoubtedly also a factor. She was accommodating to those around her, and her parents described her as a happy, sociable child who was caring of other children at her daycare center. The fact that she mixed more than her parents showed that she was not absolutely input-dependent, demonstrating a creative learning strategy (as opposed to a conservative one) as described by Serratrice (2005). She was not afraid to combine her linguistic resources creatively because her parents never indicated any lack of understanding when she did so. In so doing, she demonstrates a remarkable understanding of other persons and their intentional actions, or what Tomasello (2001) calls social cognition, from an early age. In this study, language mixing has been shown to reflect social, cognitive and communicative competence. At the tender age of two, the child clearly demonstrates an understanding that not all adults or children know three languages and that mixing languages may not be appropriate or comprehensible to others outside the home. The development of communicative competence through language socialization in the home and at the daycare center provides a window into the childs cognitive
30
capacities as well as her linguistic competencies. We could see that language mixing in the home was a marker of family identity (see also Blum-Kulka, 1997) and the norm in a multilingual home. Language mixing (within an utterance or a conversation) when viewed as shifting trans-idiomatic conventions is in fact a sophisticated communicative strategy and an appropriate linguistic tool in a multilingual home environment and has not prevented the child from differential use of her three languages in contextually appropriate ways, seen most clearly at the daycare center where her environment called for a monolingual language mode. This implies that the strict separation of languages in conversations, whether directed to children or spoken within their hearing, is not absolutely necessary for their development of sociolinguistic differentiation and pragmatic competence at an early age. More importantly, this study demonstrates the capacity of the mind to acquire and use three very different languages (at all linguistic levels) from an early age, which has implications for our understanding of the human language faculty. Because of the differences in quantitative and qualitative complexities in trilingual development, it may be as inappropriate to compare the development of trilingual children within the framework of bilingual children, as it is to compare bilingual children to monolingual children acquiring the same language. Thus further studies are needed on the linguistic and pragmatic development of trilingual children that examine and evaluate trilingualism on its own merit. In conclusion, this study shows in general that children are socialized into the language norms of their family in the flow of daily conversations and understand implicitly very early on that these home norms may not be applicable in the wider community. This fits with the social-pragmatic approach where language, like culture, must be learned in communicative interactions with others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study would not have been possible without the generous support and enthusiastic participation of Xiaoxiao and her parents. I am very grateful for their time, patience and cooperation. I also appreciate the financial support from my university, International Christian University, and the Endowment Fund that enabled me to receive research assistance especially from Mika Tamura, Michiko Kaneko and Mari Kakuta with the transcriptions and checking of the data. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
REFERENCES
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Brown, P. (2001). Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: Is there a language-specific bias for verb learning? In M. Bowerman & S. C. Levinson (Eds), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 512543). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comeau, L., Genesee, F. & Lapaquette, L. (2003). The Modeling Hypothesis and child bilingual codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7(2), 113126.
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de Len, L. (2001). Finding the richest path: Language and cognition in the acquisition of verticality in Tzotzil (Mayan). In M. Bowerman & S. C. Levinson (Eds), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (pp. 544565). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deuchar, M. & Quay, S. (2000). Bilingual acquisition: Theoretical implications of a case study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E. & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611632. Goodz, N. S. (1989). Parental language mixing in bilingual families. Infant Mental Health Journal, 10(1), 2544. Goodz, N. S. (1994). Interactions between parents and children in bilingual families. In F. Genesee (Ed.), Educating second language children: The whole child, the whole curriculum, the whole community (pp. 6182). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grosjean, F. (2001). The bilinguals language modes. In J. L. Nicol (Ed.), One mind, two languages: Bilingual language processing (pp. 122). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Harris, J. R. (1995). Where is the childs environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review, 102(3), 458489. Hoffmann, C. (2001). The status of trilingualism in bilingualism studies. In J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen & U. Jessner (Eds), Looking beyond second language acquisition: Studies in tri- and multilingualism (pp. 1325). Tbingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Jacquemet, M. (2002). Transidiomatic practices: Language and the global situation. In: Language and Cognition 20012002, University Seminar #681, Columbia University, New York (pp. 4551). Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/~remez/langcog.html/ 0102compiled.pdf. Juan-Garau, M. & Prez-Vidal, C. (2001). Mixing and pragmatic parental strategies in early bilingual acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 28, 5986. Kppe, R. (1996). Language differentiation in bilingual children: The development of grammatical and pragmatic competence. Linguistics, 34, 927954. Lanza, E. (1997). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lanza, E. (2001). Bilingual first language acquisition: A discourse perspective on language contact in parent-child interaction. In J. Cenoz & F. Genesee (Eds), Trends in bilingual acquisition (pp. 201230). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. MacWhinney, B. (1995). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Mishina, S. (1999). The role of parental input and discourse strategies in the early language mixing of a bilingual child. Multilingua, 18(4), 317342. Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicoladis, E. & Genesee, F. (1998). Parental discourse and code-mixing in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 2(2), 422432. Nicoladis, E. & Secco, G. (2000). The role of a childs productive vocabulary in the language choice of a bilingual family. First Language, 20(3), 328. Noguchi, M. G. (1996). The bilingual parent as model for the bilingual child. Policy Science [Special Issue], 245261. Pontecorvo, C., Fasulo, A. & Sterponi, L. (2001). Mutual apprentices: The making of parenthood and childhood in family dinner conversations. Human Development, 44, 340361. Quay, S. (1995). The bilingual lexicon: implications for studies of language choice. Journal of Child Language, 22, 369387.
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Quay, S. (2001). Managing linguistic boundaries in early trilingual development. In J. Cenoz & F. Genesee (Eds), Trends in bilingual acquisition (pp. 149199). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Serratrice, L. (2005). Language mixing and learning strategy. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(2), 159177. Tomasello, M. (2001). Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life. In M. Bowerman & S. C. Levinson (Eds), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 132158). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual child. Journal of Child Language, 12, 297324. Vihman, M. M. (1998). A developmental perspective on codeswitching: Conversations between a pair of bilingual siblings. International Journal of Bilingualism, 2(1), 4584.
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Dr Suzanne Quay International Christian University, 3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8585, Japan E: quay@icu.ac.jp
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Quay 2008 Trlinigual 2y.o. Conversation

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Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context

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Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context

Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at UB Wuppertal on June 17, 2013

Pragmatic reasons for language mixing in bilingual children

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

Parental language modeling

Dinner conversations as lessons in linguistic and cultural socialization: A social-pragmatic approach

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

The importance of language modes in language acquisition and pragmatic development

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

Transcription and coding

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

Table 1 The frequency of routine Japanese expressions in dinner conversations

Itadakimasu FAT 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 MOT 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 XIA 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 3 1 3 2 2

Gochisousama FAT 1 4 8 1 1 2 0 1 0 9 3 0 2 1 1 1 0 MOT 1 0 4 0 2 3 0 2 0 2 2 2 1 2 0 0 1

Language choices in dinner conversations

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

Parental report to MOT to FAT

17 video-recorded family sessions to XIA to MOT to FAT

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

Figure 2 Language choice in three mother-child sessions (age 2;0.202;1.3)

Language mixing of the trilingual child and her parents

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

No. utterances in 17 sessions

E/C J/C MOT

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

1;11.8 Age Japanese Mixed

Rule-governed language choice

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

QUAY: MULTILINGUAL DINNER CONVERSATIONS

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