Korean-English bilingual sibling interactions and socialization

This paper examines how a pair of Korean-American siblings interact and socialize and how their interactions change over time as the younger sibling starts to go to an English-speaking preschool. A 7-year-old Korean-English bilingual girl and her 3-year-old sister were observed in their home over 23 visits within a year. Their discourse data, including 33 h of audio-recordings, were analyzed from the Language Socialization perspective. The older sibling's authority derived from the age-based Korean family hierarchy inevitably played a role in creating shared benefits in the bilingual sibling relationship. After the younger sibling began to speak English, there were noticeable changes in the power asymmetry and language parallelism-the younger sibling's repetition of older sibling's utterances. This study offers insight into the bidirectionality of sibling socialization processes of sibling interactions in relation to their bilingual and bicultural development.