Code-Blending In Bimodal Bilingual Deaf Children

Deaf and hearing children exposed to a spoken language and a signed language acquire and use both of these languages, and thus become bimodal bilinguals. Unlike unimodal bilinguals, bimodal bilinguals can mix the two languages in a simultaneous manner, thus producing signs and spoken words at the same time (code-blends). Studies on code-blending in children are scarce, and the great majority have been based on hearing children. In this paper, the production of code-blends in 9 deaf bimodal bilingual children (mean age, 9.5 years; range, 8.1-11.9 years) exposed to spoken Italian and Italian Sign Language were explored, along with the relationship between code-blending and linguistic skills in some aspects of their spoken Italian. Children were asked to tell a story to a hearing experimenter, who invited them to use spoken Italian. Individual differences in the children were very high and appeared to be independent of the hearing status of the parents and whether or not the children learned Italian Sign Language as a first or second language. All of the children used mainly spoken Italian in their narrative, and about 70% of code-blends showed semantically congruent production. The correlations between code-blends and linguistic skills in spoken Italian suggest that these children use code-blends to help them to create more precise mapping between a concept (expressed by the sign) and the corresponding word. Further studies are needed to explore more in depth the factors that affect individual variability in deaf children during their code-blending.