Code switching in a Japanese-Chinese bilingual infant:
A study on language dominance

It is generally believed that there is an unbalanced distribution of bilinguals’ two languages in the construction of intra-sentential code switching utterances. The Dominant Language Hypothesis (Petersen, 1988) predicts a notion of language dominance, hence assuming a uni-directionality of code switching from the dominant language to the non-dominant one. The present case study of a Japanese-Chinese bilingual infant attempts to examine the notion of language dominance and the nature of switching directionality. Even though our bilingual infant showed strong Japanese dominance in code switching, we are going to argue that such dominance should be viewed in terms of a ‘bilingual dominance continuum’ rather than that of uni-directionality, since doing so would allow us to account for all the so-called counter-examples.