Language mixing of the bilingual child : how significant is parental input?

This study examines the effect of parental input on a child’s language production by investigating the mixed utterances used by a Japanese–English bilingual child and her mother, using Japanese as the matrix language. The relationship between parental input and children’s output is a well-discussed topic in the literature. Some researchers have viewed parental input as having a direct effect on a child’s particular speech patterns. This view has been supported by several bilingual language mixing studies, as well as one study investigating monolingual children’s use of Japanese particles in narratives. Studies investigating the relationship between parental input and the frequency of that input have also confirmed that there seems to be a strong correlation between parental input and children’s output.