UC Davis

Developmental researchers have identified child-directed speech (CDS) as a bonafide speech register with distinct elements across languages, yet research on bilingual CDS and its unique features, like code-switching, is lacking. The present study sought to establish what bilingual English-Spanish caregivers do when they talk to their children (in functional terms) and how this talk is distributed across their languages. Additionally, the study explored the role of cross-language repetition and whether it appears to be a viable mechanism for dual-language learning. 27 English-Spanish-speaking bilingual mothers and their 16-to-24-month old children recorded two naturalistic play sessions in their homes using toys that were familiar to the children and toys that were novel, respectively. Results showed that mothers’ amount of talk did not vary according to their children's familiarity with the toys, and mothers did not use different types of utterances more between the Familiar and Novel conditions. Only in the case of Directives did mothers appear to differentially prefer a language for a given utterance type, using Spanish significantly more than English or code-switched utterances. Across the board mothers used Spanish most, accounting for nearly 55% of utterances, followed by English, and lastly code-switched utterances. Cross-language repetitions occurred less than 1% of the time, suggesting that this type of code-switch is unlikely to be an important mechanism for dual-language label learning as hypothesized. Mothers code-switched within utterances roughly the same amount as prior studies, but code-switched between utterances up to seven times more than previous samples. These findings offer insight into how bilingual caregivers weavetogether the functional properties, the “what”, of child-directed speech with the unique “how” of bilingualism, language choice.