The Development of Bimodal Bilingualism: Implications for Linguistic Theory.
A wide range of linguistic phenomena contribute to our understanding of the architecture of the human linguistic system. In this paper we present a proposal dubbed Language Synthesis to capture bilingual phenomena including code switching and 'transfer' as automatic consequences of the addition of a second language, using basic concepts of Minimalism and Distributed Morphology. Bimodal bilinguals, who use a sign language and a spoken language, provide a new type of evidence regarding possible bilingual phenomena, namely code blending, the simultaneous production of (aspects of) a message in both speech and sign. We argue that code blending also follows naturally once a second articulatory interface is added to the model. Several different types of code blending are discussed in connection to the predictions of the Synthesis model. Our primary data come from children developing as bimodal bilinguals, but our proposal is intended to capture a wide range of bilingual effects across any language pair.
Linguistic approaches to bilingualism