This edited collection contains contributions from an impressive number of leading code-switching (CS) researchers. It is divided into five parts: (a) conceptual and methodological considerations, (b) social aspects, (c) structural implications, (d) psycholinguistics, and (e) formal models. In the first chapter, the editors provide an overview of CS. Along with many of the sources reviewed, they make a distinction between intrasentential and intersentential CS but perhaps miss an opportunity to clear up terminological confusion. Some investigators use the term CS to mean intraclausal, whereas others (e.g., Dorlein and Nortier, in chapter 8) use it as Bullock and Toribio to include switching within a complex sentence made up of more than one clause. The editors should have used the opportunity in this introductory chapter to draw attention to this multiple usage and perhaps recommend replacement of these terms by future researchers with the clearer intraclausal and interclausal.

This volume includes some particularly original findings in the area of phonetics. For example, Khattab, in her chapter “Phonetic Accommodation in Children’s Code-Switching,” provides evidence that should help modify the common view on the overwhelming influence of peer input. This evidence is inconsistent with Chambers’s (Reference Chambers2002) idea of an innate accent filter that removes accented speech from the input. She reports that three English-Arabic bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 10 living in the United Kingdom alternated between nativelike pronunciation of English and Arabic-influenced pronunciation. Although they used nativelike pronunciation with their peers, their pronunciation with their mothers varied between convergence with the mothers’ Arabic-influenced pronunciation and divergence to nativelike patterns, depending on the situation. This suggests that children can actually draw on nonnative input as part of their developing repertoire when the situation requires it. Another chapter that presents new findings is “Phonetic Reflexes of Code-Switching.” In this chapter, Bullock reports on a study that demonstrated that CS had an effect on the phonetic production of English-Spanish bilinguals. The measurement of voice onset times (VOTs) in the voiceless stops of English words showed influence from Spanish in the reading of sentences that contained CS whereas Spanish stops were not influenced by English. The effect was independent of language dominance or proficiency. Bullock’s explanation for the asymmetry of this phenomenon is that the larger VOT range for English voiceless stops allows them to become more Spanish-like without becoming Spanish; the smaller VOT range for Spanish voiceless stops, on the other hand, means that convergence of the Spanish VOTs to English would make them not only more English-like but actually English. Speakers apparently avoid going this far. Additional chapters of interest to SLA researchers include those on CS and transfer (Treffers-Daller), language mixing in bilingual children (Müller and Cantone), and attrition (Bolonyai). Treffers-Daller argues for a unified account of both CS and transfer, arguing that they are “manifestations of the same phenomenon, i.e., the influence of one language on another” (p. 73). Müller and Cantone pursue the applicability of a Minimalist syntactic framework to bilingual child utterances, exploring in particular whether the language of functional categories determines the position of their complements in child speech, as has been argued for adult speech. The data actually provide more support for this hypothesis than they claim, as the examples cited are consistent with the idea of the determiner influencing adjective-noun order. Finally, Bolonyai argues that CS may play a role in language attrition in children. As evidence, she cites her earlier (Bolonyai, Reference Bolonyai1998) study of a young Hungarian-American immigrant child, which showed that composite (mixed) grammatical structures were more frequent in code-switched than in monolingual utterances. However, the most convincing evidence of attrition seems to come from those Hungarian monolingual utterances for which Bolonyai does indeed find convergence toward English structures. This convergence may be due to the effect of the English-speaking community in which she lives rather than to CS.