Saying It in Another Way: Understanding Trilingual Children's Social Competence through Cross-Linguistic Mixing

Does speaking more than one language promote a child’s social competence in the everyday life? Little is known about this important topic in research literature. Past research suggests that multilinguals (both bilinguals and... [ view full abstract ]

Does speaking more than one language promote a child’s social competence in the everyday life? Little is known about this important topic in research literature. Past research suggests that multilinguals (both bilinguals and trilinguals) use cross-linguistic mixings strategically in communication (Li and Wu, 2009) to achieve different communication purposes, such as to express emotions as an indication of anger, annoyance and authority reinforcement (e.g., Gumperz 1970), to emphasize or negotiate complex linguistic and cultural identity, or to construct and reconstruct a third space of in-between one’s identities--a linguistic nepantla (Sánchez-Muñoz, 2013), and to mark group membership, solidarity or social status or class (e.g., Grosjean, 1982; Gumperz 1982). However, research has not focused on how these abilities are developed longitudinally and whether speaking more than one language indeed succors multilingual children’s social competence. Thus, the purpose of this longitudinal study is to explore whether cross-linguistic mixings produced by trilingual children can cultivate their social competence and if so, how they do it. Two simultaneous trilingual siblings participated in the study. Seventy-six hours of video-recorded naturalistic data across a span of seven years (from age 1 to age 19) were randomly selected for the study from a large corpus of longitudinal data source. A coding schedule developed by (Wang, 2017) was used to code and analyzed the data. The results suggest that the two siblings were able to ease tension, express negative emotions, offer constructive criticism, and infuse humor to keep the communication channel open by utilizing cross-linguist mixings in situations that were otherwise confrontational and unpleasant. Overall, the siblings’ social competence demonstrated in their cross-linguistic mixings is not a small feat. Having more than one language available to them, the siblings were able to capitalize their multilingual resources to leverage their intents in socially intelligent ways.