This article investigates the role of direct input in the code-mixing of three bilingual
children aged 2–4 years acquiring English as one language, and either German, Polish,
or Finnish as the other. From a usage-based perspective, it is assumed that early
children’s utterances are item-based and that they contain many lexically fixed patterns.
To account for such patterns, the traceback method has been developed to test the
hypothesis that children’s utterances are constructed on the basis of a limited inventory
of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. We apply this method to the code-mixed
utterances, suggesting that much of the code-mixing occurs within frame-and-slot
patterns, such as Was ist X? as in Was ist breakfast muesli? “What is breakfast muesli?”
We further analyzed each code-mixed utterance in terms of priming. Our findings
suggest that much of the early code-mixing is based on concrete lexically fixed patterns
which are subject to input occurring in immediately prior speech, either the child’s own
or that of her caregivers
