Code-Mixing Causes Confusion In Young Bilingual Speakers, Or Does It?!

Abstract

This study provides empirical, comparative and statistical analysis of 2 different categories of people: the first category was 250 students academically involved in educational establishments; their monolingual and bilingual language experience and their attitudes to people who mix 2 languages at their speech. A long with the survey which was carried out at the metro station of Beruniy, we did the second experiment, namely, we took interviews from 67 mothers of 1-14 year-old children, residing in Tashkent, in order to gain reliable information about children being brought up in a monolingual/bilingual or even multilingual atmosphere; those children’s language development and difficulties, parents’ plans for their children’s language skills, support and motivation. Especially, we intended to observe if bilingual environment is causing any language confusion to a child and the role of parent’s code-mixing in the family. The obtained results of the first experiment were different from what we had expected. The participants expressed neutral (44%) and positive (35%) attitude to code-mixing among bilingual people. The second experiment opened the doors to the world of young children and their language experience retold by their mothers. At the final stage of our analysis we realized that code-mixing as a common language phenomenon is rather natural and not seen as a linguistic error among majority participants of the experiments. Concerning the children and their language development which was under empirical and statistical studies, majority of them who are experiencing sequential bilingualism in particular, from early ages did not display any language confusion; though simultaneous bilingual children of young age had some confusion with vocabulary comprehension.