Bilingualism

Exposed to 2 languages

from birth

Speaker is

fluent in 2 languages

Bilingualism

• If a speaker is fluent in two languages, then they are said to be bilingual.

• The commonly held image of a bilingual person is of someone brought up in a culture where they are exposed to two languages from birth.

• It is not necessary for them to be equally fluent in both languages, but at least they should be very competent in the second one.

Bilingualism

productive receptive

Some authorities (Bialystock, 2001) distinguish the following:

1. Productive Bilingualism – speakers can produce and understand both languages.

2. Receptive Bilingualism – Speakers can understand both languages but have more limited production abilities.

Categories of Bilingualism

Categories of Bilingualism

• 1. Simultaneous Bilingualism – L1 and L2 learned about the same time• 2. Early Sequential Bilingualism – L1

learned first, but L2 learned relatively early, in childhood

• Early Sequential Bilinguals form the largest group world-wide and the number is increasing, particular in countries with large immigration rates.

• 3. Late Bilingualism – L2 learned in adolescence onwards

FACT: One of the Earliest Detailed Studies of Bilingualism: Diary Study of Leopold (1939 - 1949)

• Leopold was a German linguist, whose daughter Hildegard had an American mother and lived from an early age in the USA.

• German was used in the home at first, but this soon gave way to English, the environment language.

• The diary showed that young children can quickly (within 6 months) forget the old language and pick up a new one, if they move to another country. • Initially the two languages are mixed

up, but differentiation quickly emerges.

• We observe language mixing when words combine, such an English suffix added to a Filipino root, or English words put into a Filipino syntactic structure, or responding to questions in one language with answers in another.

Language Mixing

• Switching from one language to another is termed as a crutch syndrome.

• A bilingual who is stumped in one language can keep on speaking by depending on a translated complete utterance, or word or phrase as a stand-by.

• It is divided into two: code-switching and code-mixing, in that order.

Language Mixing

• In a more nuanced definition where code-switching involves inserting whole utterances – inter-sententially – in a second, non-dominant language during conversa tion, while the more specific term of code-mixing (or borrowing) involves the blending of non-dominant language words or phrases within an utterance – intra-sententially.

Language Mixing

• Using this definition, and presuming that English is the dominant language in the following utterances:

• ‘Is this what we are having for dinner today? Sira naba tuktok mo? [Are you crazy?] It’s not Saturday and I don’t eat tuyo [smoked/dried fish] except on Saturdays. It just doesn’t seem right!’

Language Mixing

• The first italicized utterance is a code-switch, while the second italicized word in the next utterance is a code-mix. • Some say that this crutch syndrome

is a model of incompetence.

Language Processing

Separate-Store Models

• There are separate lexicons for each language.

• These are connected at the semantic level (Potter, So, von Eckardt @ Feldman, 1984).

• Evidence for the separate-store model comes from the finding that the amount of facilitation gained by repeating a word (a technique called repetition priming: or facilitatory – priming by repeating a stimulus) is much greater and longer lasting within than between languages (Kirsner, Smith, Lockhart, King & Jain, 1984), although repetition priming might not be tapping semantic processes (Scarborough, Gerard & Cortese, 1984).

Common-Store Models

• There is just one lexicon and one semantic memory system, with words from both languages stored in it and connected directly together (Paivio, Clark & Lamber, 1988).

• This model is supported by evidence that semantic priming produces facilitation between languages.

• Studies that minimize the role of attentional processing and participants’ strategies, and that maximize automatic processing suggest that equivalent words share an underlying semantic representation that can mediate priming the words.

Cognates

• Cognates are words in different languages that have the same root and meaning and which look similar. • This is the mixture of separate-

store and common-store models.

• For example, concrete words and culturally similar words act as though they are stored in common, whereas abstract and other words act as though they are stored in separate stores.

• Also steering between the common- and separate-stores modes, Grosjean and Soares (1986) argued that the language system is flexible in a bilingual speaker, and that its behavior depends on the circumstances.

Syntactic Processing

Shared Syntax

Bilingual Syntactic Processing

• A study of Spanish-English bilingual speakers found that a particular syntactic structure in one language could make it easier to use the same structure in the second language, supporting the “shared syntax” idea (Hartsuiker, Pickering & Vetkamp, 2004).

• Similarly, Loebell and Bock (2003) found that production of German datives primed the subsequent use of English datives, and vice versa. Similar results have been found in Dutch-English bilinguals (Salamoura & Williams, 2006).

Interlanguage

Transfer

Moving Between Languages

• How do we translate between two languages? As we might remember from school, or from our last foreign holiday, translating a foreign language can be fraught with difficulties.

Kroll and Stewart (1994) proposed the following:

• 1. Forward Translation – They argued that we can translate words from our first language to second language by conceptual mediation (or forward translation). This means that we must access the meaning of a word in order to translate it.

• 2. Backward Translation – In contrast, we translate from the second language into the first by word association (or backward translation) – that is, we use direct links between items in the lexicon.

Salamat!

Remember!There are probably both costs and benefits of learning two languages at once.

Remember!L2 acquisition in adulthood and later childhood is difficult because it is not like L1 acquisition.

Remember!There has been much debate as to how we translate words between languages.

Remember!Translation probably does involve conceptual mediation.

Remember!Bilingualism is a useful tool for studying other language processes.

References

• Books/Journals:• Bialystok, E. & Hakuta, K. (1994). In Other Words: The Science

and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. New York: Basic Books

• Crystal, D. (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (2nded). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Cummins, J. (1991). Interdependence of First- and Second-Language Proficiency in Bilingual Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• de Klerk, V. (2006). Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: An Analysis of Xhosa English. Great Britain: Biddles Ltd.

• Grosjean, F. & Soares, C. (1986). Processing Mixed Language: Some Preliminary Findings. Linguistic Processing in Bilinguals: Psycholinguistics and Neuropsychological Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

• Harley, T. A. (2008). The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory. UK: Ashford Colour Press Ltd.

• Harley, B. and Wang, W. (1997). The Critical Period Hypothesis: Where Are We Now. Tutorials in Bilingualism: Psychololinguistic Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

• Kirsner, K., Smith, M., Lockhart, R. S., King, M. L. & Jain, M. (1984). The Bilingual Lexicon: Language Specific Units in an Integrated Network. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour

• Magiste, E. (1986). Selected Issues in Second and Third Language Learning. Linguistic Processing in Bilinguals: Psycholinguistics and Neuropsychological Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

• Nishimura, M. (1986). Intra-sentential Codeswitching: The Case of Language Assignment. Language Processing in Bilinguals. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

• Paivio, A., Clark, J. M. & Lambert, W. E. (1988). Bilingual Dual-Coding Theory and Sematic Repetition Effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition

• Potter, M. C., So, K. F., von Eckardt, B. & Feldman, L. B. (1984). Lexical and Conceptual Representation in Beginning and Proficient Bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour

• Scarborough, D. L. Gerard, L. & Cortese, C. (1984). Independence of Lexical Access in Bilingual Word Recognition. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour

• Online: • Grosjean, F. (2012). Can a First Language be Totally Forgotten?

Retrieved, July 17, 2012, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201207/can-first-language-be-totally-forgotten

• PDF:• An Integrated Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism: 1976-2000

(Michel Paradis, 2009)• Bilingual/Immersion Education: Indicators Of Good Practice - Final

Report to the Ministry of Education (S. May, R. Hill, S. Tiakiwai, 2004)• Bilingual Language Processing (Timothy Desmet* and Wouter Duyck,

2007)• The Right of the Deaf Child to Grow up Bilingual (François Grosjean)• The Bilingual Family Newsletter (1990).

• From: International Journal of Bilingualism• Effects of Input on the Early Grammatical Development

of Bilingual Children (Elma Blom, 2010)• Interpreter-mediated Interaction as Bilingual Speech:

Bridging Macro- and Micro-sociolinguistics in Codeswitching Research (Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer, 2010)

• Is it Language Relearning or Language Reacquisition? Hints from a Young Boy’s Code-switching During His Journey Back to His Native Language (Tove I. Dahl, Curt Rice, Marie Steffensen, Ludmila Amundsen, 2010)

• What is the Impact of Age of Second Language Acquisition on the Production of Consonants and Vowels Among Childhood Bilinguals? (Andrea A. N. MacLeod, Carol Stoel-Gammon, 2010)