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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Peña and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: * Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. * Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. * Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. * Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children's language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
1 Bilingual Adults and Children
Introduction
General Aspects of Bilingualism
Bilingual Children
Summary
References
2 Speech Perception and Comprehension
Introduction
From the Speech Wave to the Mental Representation
Processing in Bilingual Adults
Processing in Bilingual Children
Summary
References
Part I: Speech Processing in Adults
3 Speech Perception
Introduction
Perception of Speech Segments by Bilinguals
Factors Affecting Bilinguals’ Speech Perception
Theories of Cross‐Language Speech Perception
The Role of Suprasegmentals in Speech Perception
Future Challenges and Directions
Summary
References
4 Spoken Word Recognition
Introduction
How Does Word Recognition Take Place and How Do Bilinguals Fare?
Language Proficiency, Use and History
Lower Level Information
Processing Mechanisms and Strategies
The Activation of Candidates
Summary
References
5 Processing at Higher Levels
Introduction
Auditory Sentence Comprehension: Stages and Principles
Syntactic Analysis
Processing the Meaning of Words
Syntactic Integration and Revision
Discussion and Conclusion
Summary
References
6 Processing Bilingual Speech
Introduction
Does the Perception of Spoken Code‐Switches Take Extra Time?
The Recognition of Guest Words
The Processing of Interferences
Summary
References
7 Assessing Perception and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults
Introduction
Issues in Bilingual Assessment
Word Recognition
Word Frequency and Familiarity
Recognition of Connected Speech
Factors That Affect Assessment of Speech Perception in Bilinguals
Summary
References
Part II: Speech Processing in Children
8 Speech Perception
Introduction
Simultaneous Bilingual Infants
Child L2 Learners
Summary
References
9 Spoken Word Recognition
Introduction
Finding Words in the Speech Stream
Learning New Words
Recognizing Familiar Words
The Role of Speech Perception in Learning and Recognizing Words
Bilingual Children’s Vocabulary
Summary
References
10 Processing at Higher Levels
Introduction
Asymmetries Between Comprehension and Production
Real‐Time Processing
Cross‐Linguistic Influence
Input and Exposure
Summary
References
11 Assessing Perception and Comprehension in Bilingual Children, Without and With Speech and Language Impairment
Introduction
Defining Language Impairment
Phonological Perception and Word Learning
Challenges in Assessment of Bilingual Children
Assessment of Single Word Knowledge
Parent Report Measures
Assessment of Semantic Knowledge
Implications for Practice
Summary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 Describing a bilingual in terms of language use and language proficiency at two moments in time: at ages 24 and 34.
Figure 1.2 The domains covered by a bilingual’s three languages.
Figure 1.3 Developing skills in perception and comprehension in the first few years of life.
Figure 1.4 An illustration of the sensitive period for language acquisition. A new language is often more easily acquired earlier in life than later in life.
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 The basic components involved in speech perception and comprehension.
Figure 2.2 The components involved in speech perception and comprehension in bilinguals.
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1 Schematic of two psychometric functions (see text for details).
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1 A schematic showing the process of perceptual narrowing. Initially, infants perceive nearly all the possible phonetic contrasts for the world’s languages. They quickly lose the ability to perceive non‐native contrasts.
Figure 8.2 An infant participating in a head‐turn preference study.
Figure 8.3 An infant participating in a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 Unfamiliar crown‐shaped (left) and molecule‐shaped (right) visual stimuli used in word‐learning studies.
Figure 9.2 A child participating in a looking‐while‐listening study. Children see a pair of objects on the screen and hear one of them labeled (“Look at the dog!”). The proportion of time that children look towards the labeled object is measured.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Examples of visual stimuli from the truth value judgment task in Grüter and Crago (2012).
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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The Listening Bilingual
Speech Perception, Comprehension, and Bilingualism
François Grosjean and Krista Byers‐Heinlein
With contributions from
Mark Antoniou
Theres Grüter
Robert J. Hartsuiker
Elizabeth D. Peña and Lisa M. Bedore
Lu‐Feng Shi
This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this titleis available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of François Grosjean and Krista Byers‐Heinlein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data applied for
Hardback ISBN: 9781118835777Paperback ISBN: 9781118835791
Cover image: © Christoph Burgstedt/ShutterstockCover design: Wiley
Author Biographies
Primary authors
François Grosjean is Professor Emeritus of Psycholinguistics at Neuchâtel University,
Switzerland. His publications on bilingualism include many articles and chapters as well as five books: Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism (1982), Studying Bilinguals (2008), Bilingual: Life and Reality (2010), The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism (with Ping Li, 2013) and Parler plusieurs langues: Le monde des bilingues (2015). He is a Founding Editor of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition and was its first Coordinating Editor.
Krista Byers‐Heinlein is Associate Professor of Psychology at Concordia University, where she holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism. Her work investigates language, cognitive, and social development in bilingual infants and children. She has authored many peer‐reviewed articles on early bilingualism in journals such as Psychological Science and Child Development. She is a member of the editorial boards of Infancy and Developmental Science. This is her first book.
Guest Authors
Mark Antoniou is Senior Research Fellow at The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University. His published works on bilingual speech perception, within the Journal of Phonetics and The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, were the first attempts to extend The Perceptual Assimilation Model to account for language mode effects on speech perception in fluent bilingual listeners.
Theres Grüter is Associate Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and currently serves as an Associate Editor for Applied Psycholinguistics. Her research investigates how language learners of all kinds – children and adults, monolingual and bilingual – process structural aspects of language. Her publications include journal articles on child and adult second language acquisition and bilingualism, and a co‐edited volume (with Johanne Paradis) on Input and Experience in Bilingual Development (2014).
Robert J. Hartsuiker is Professor of Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. He is interested in the production and comprehension of language in bilinguals and on the consequences of using a second language for learning and memory. He has published many peer‐reviewed articles on bilingualism in journals such as Psychological Science, Cognition and Journal of Memory and Language.
Elizabeth D. Peña is Professor of Education at The University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the question of differentiating language impairment and language difference through dynamic assessment and development of standardized testing. She is a co‐author of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment, which was designed to assess speech and language ability in Spanish–English bilingual children.
Lisa M. Bedore is Professor and Chair in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University. Her research interests focus on the nature of language impairment across languages. She is especially interested in the ways that children integrate information they experience in language learning. This has guided her work on projects focusing on clinical markers of language impairment and language intervention for bilingual students.
Lu‐Feng Shi was Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Long Island University. His research interest was speech perception in special adult populations such as bilingual individuals and individuals with hearing or processing impairment. His work with bilingual listeners helped bridge bilingualism ‐ traditionally a topic in linguistics, psychology, and education ‐ with the field of clinical communication sciences. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Ear and Hearing and various clinical audiology journals. Regretfully, Lu‐Feng Shi passed away on January 28, 2017.
Introduction
Listening to speech is the communication skill we use most frequently. It has often been reported that of the four skills we use daily (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), it is perceiving and comprehending speech – in other words, going from the acoustic wave to a mental representation of what has been said – that is the most frequent. In addition, with the exception of Deaf children acquiring sign language, the vast majority of infants acquire language through listening. People who acquire and then use two or more languages in their everyday life are no different. The amount of time spent listening may in fact be greater for some bi‐ and multilinguals who do not know how to read and write in all of their languages, and consequently spend most of their time in the spoken modality.
A book such as this one, dedicated solely to spoken language processing in bilinguals, be they adults or children, is thus a necessity in the ever growing field of bilingualism research. It has several aims. The first is to bring together the various strands of spoken language processing in bilinguals, many of which are studied independently of one another: speech perception, word recognition and higher level processing, the perception of bilingual speech containing code‐switches, borrowings and interferences, as well as the assessment of speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. To achieve this aim, the main authors have benefited from the collaboration of guest authors who are experts in their own fields – Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert Hartsuiker, Elizabeth Peña and Lisa Bedore, and Lu‐Feng Shi.
The second aim is to introduce readers to the approaches used in the study of speech perception and comprehension in bilinguals, most notably experimentation involving both well‐established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. In all the chapters, the authors present the approaches and methodology used in their domains by taking illustrative studies and describing them in some detail. This allows us to do away with specific sections on methodology, which can be rather dry when isolated from the issues of interest. Finally, the third aim is to present the various aspects of spoken language processing in bilinguals in a clear, informative and pedagogical manner. Much of the research we cover has been presented in academic journals, which have presentation formats and styles that are not always transparent. We have worked hard to make this research accessible to our readers.
The book begins with an introductory chapter, Chapter 1, which gives a brief overview of bilingual adults and children and lays the foundations for a better understanding of how they perceive and comprehend speech. It also describes various aspects of language knowledge and processing that they bring to the studies they take part in. It is followed by a shorter chapter, Chapter 2, which gives an overview of speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children when they process two or more languages, either separately or together in the form of mixed speech. It describes the general architecture involved in speech processing and discusses the issues that are common to all processing levels in bilinguals. It also outlines how first language acquisition takes place in children.
The book is then organized into two parts. Part I concerns speech processing in adults. Chapter 3, written by Mark Antoniou, reviews speech perception by bilingual listeners and examines the factors that have been shown to affect it, such as age of acquisition, language use, proficiency, and language mode. It also provides an overview of the models used to explain the perceptual patterns of bilinguals and discusses the literature on the perception of prosody in those listeners. Chapter 4 discusses how word recognition takes place in bilinguals and reviews the factors that play a role in how well bilinguals recognize words in their two languages. Among these we find those present at other levels of processing (language proficiency, use, and history) but also the nature of the input that comes from the speech perception level, the activation level of the language not being processed, and so on. Chapter 5, authored by Robert Hartsuiker, discusses the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing in bilinguals. It examines, among other things, how bilinguals undertake syntactic analysis and build the sentence structure, how they process the meaning of words, their use of prediction, and the role they give to pragmatics in auditory comprehension. Chapter 6 concentrates on the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech, that is speech that contains code‐switches, borrowings, and interferences. It examines whether the perception of code‐switches takes extra processing time, the processes by which code‐switches and borrowings are recognized, as well as the perception of interferences. The final chapter of this first part, Chapter 7, written by Lu‐Feng Shi, discusses the assessment of adult bilingual speech perception and comprehension in the clinical context. Topics covered are how to assess bilinguals effectively and efficiently, the processing of words and connected speech in various test conditions, as well as the relationship between the language background of bilinguals and their assessment performance.
Part II concentrates on speech processing in bilingual children. Chapter 8 explores how bilingual infants and children perceive and process speech in their languages, and how this changes with experience. The chapter covers the development of language discrimination, the perception of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, the processing of tone and lexical stress, as well as the development of phonological awareness. Chapter 9 discusses how bilingual infants and children learn and recognize spoken words. It examines how children locate words in the auditory speech stream, link those words to meaning, and then recognize familiar words in real‐time speech. It also looks at how they apply their speech perception skills to learn similar‐sounding words, and discusses the development of vocabulary size and structure. Chapter 10, written by Theres Grüter, provides an overview of bilingual children’s comprehension and processing at the sentence level. Among the topics discussed are the asymmetry between expressive and receptive skills, as well as the roles of cross‐linguistic influence, the variability in input, and the development of higher level skills. Finally, Chapter 11, authored by Elizabeth Peña and Lisa Bedore, focuses on how researchers and clinicians assess the vocabulary and semantic knowledge of bilingual children. Accurate assessment is important for describing children’s language abilities and for identifying those with language impairment. It becomes a real challenge to determine whether the overall language development of bilingual children is progressing at the expected rate in comparison to their monolingual peers.
Two points need to be made here. First, to our knowledge, there is no book dedicated exclusively to speech perception and comprehension in bilinguals that covers both adults and children. By offering such a book, we hope that it will encourage researchers working on adults and those working on children to learn about the other branch of bilingual psycholinguistics and that it will foster collaboration between the two. Second, by adding two chapters on the clinical assessment of bilinguals, one on adults and the other on children, we hope that our book will be of use not only to colleagues and their students involved in basic research but also to those who are more clinically oriented. If, as a side product, more interaction between the two takes place in the future, we would be the first to applaud this result.
This book can be used for courses in psycholinguistics, linguistics, cognitive sciences, speech and language pathology, bilingualism, applied linguistics, and first and second language acquisition. It is suitable for upper level BA and BS courses, first‐ and second‐year graduate studies, as well as for the laypersons who wish to find out about speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children.
We would like to end by thanking our guest authors who very kindly accepted to take part in this book project and write chapters for the level of reader at which the book is aimed. They have done a wonderful job integrating their chapters into the book and for this we are grateful to them. This book would not have been possible without the initial support and encouragement of Danielle Descoteaux, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Wiley. We thank her wholeheartedly. Her successors, Mark Calley and Tanya McMullin, took on the project with enthusiasm and were also of great help. The project editors, Julia Kirk, Manish Lutra, and Nivetha Udayakumar, the editorial assistants, Elizabeth Saucier and Maddie Koufogazos, and the copyeditor, Patricia Bateson, have all been extremely supportive and we are very grateful to them.
When the preparation of a book such as this one spans a number of years, there are bound to be moments of joy and moments of sadness. We went through an especially sad moment when one of our guest authors, Lu‐Feng Shi, passed away. He was a wonderful colleague to work with and he did a tremendous job despite his failing health in his last year. We will sorely miss him. However, we also went through moments of great joy during these years with, notably, the birth of a daughter, Julia, and of two grandchildren, Ismaël and Mia. They are growing up bilingual and we wish to dedicate this book to them.
François Grosjean and Krista Byers‐Heinlein
December 2017
1Bilingual Adults and Children: A Short Introduction
François Grosjean and Krista Byers‐Heinlein
Introduction
A book such as this one on a specialized topic – the perception and comprehension of speech by bilinguals – needs to begin with a brief description of bilingual adults and children.
Those who are interested in the topic may be familiar with speech perception and comprehension issues but might not know as much about bilingualism. They might also have a few misconceptions about what it means to be bilingual, both for the adult and the child. Many preconceived ideas surround bilingualism, such as that bilinguals have equal and perfect knowledge of their two or more languages, that they all acquired their languages as children, that they are competent translators, or that they do not have an accent in any of their languages. As concerns children, it was long believed that bilingualism would delay their language acquisition and create confusion, or that they would invariably mix their languages, or even that being bilingual would have negative effects on their development. The first aim of this chapter is to give a brief overview of bilingual adults and children and to lay the foundations for a better understanding of issues that relate to their perception and comprehension of speech.
A second aim is to describe what it is that bilinguals, both adults and children, bring to the studies that they take part in. When they become participants and enter the world of experimentation, they bring with them various aspects of language knowledge and processing that characterize them as “regular bilinguals.” Some of these might be studied specifically in the research itself, whilst others are controlled for, and some others might be free to vary. It is important to keep them in mind when discussing studies so as to fully understand the data that are obtained.
In the first part of this chapter, we will concentrate on a few general characteristics of bilinguals, primarily adults, since children will be covered in the second part. We will first discuss how bilinguals can be described in terms of language proficiency and language use, and how these variables play a large part in the language history of each individual bilingual. This will be followed by a rapid survey of the functions of languages as well as of language dominance. Next, language mode will be evoked and aspects such as interference, transfer, code‐switching, and borrowing will be discussed. Finally, biculturalism will be mentioned, as will the impact it can have on language knowledge and processing.
In the second part of the chapter, we will discuss special issues related to bilingual children. First, we will overview the different ages and the different ways that children become bilingual. Next, we will talk about the important role of language exposure in early bilingualism, and how researchers evaluate whether a very young child should be considered bilingual or not. We will then provide a brief overview of language acquisition in infancy and early childhood, and outline several key differences between bilingual children and adults. Finally, we will discuss how bilingual children use language in their lives and include topics such as language dominance and code‐switching.
General Aspects of Bilingualism
Language Proficiency, Use, and History
A quick survey of definitions of bilingualism over the years reveals the presence of two important factors that characterize bilinguals – language proficiency and language use. In the early years of bilingualism research, language proficiency was put forward as the main defining factor, and it remains the feature most mentioned by lay people when speaking about the topic. Hence, in his now famous definition, Bloomfield (1933) stated that bilingualism is the native‐like control of two languages. Realizing that bilinguals are rarely equally fluent in their languages, Haugen (1969) stayed with proficiency but offered a much less constraining definition: bilingualism begins at the point where the speaker of one language can produce complete, meaningful utterances in the other language.
Whilst some researchers continued describing bilinguals in terms of language proficiency, others were stressing another factor, language use. Hence Weinreich (1953) defined bilingualism as the practice of alternately using two languages, and Mackey (1962), a few years later, considered bilingualism as the alternate use of two or more languages by the same individual. Over the years, this definition of bilingualism has been adopted by most researchers, among them Grosjean (2013), who defines it as the use of two or more languages (or dialects) in everyday life. This definition has several advantages. The first is that it does not exclude language proficiency as such since the regular use of two or more languages requires, as a matter of course, a certain level of knowledge of each language. Other advantages are that it accounts for people who use more than two languages – there are many such people in the world today – and it encompasses dialects, a linguistic reality in many countries of the world.
Most researchers would now agree that both language proficiency and language use must be taken into account when describing bilinguals. Almost fifty years ago, Fishman and Cooper (1969) showed that they were the best predictors of a number of proficiency criterion variables. Later, Grosjean (2010) presented a grid approach to take into account the two variables. To illustrate this, Figure 1.1 (top part) presents the bilingualism profile of a person at the age of 24. Language use is shown along the vertical axis (never used to daily use) and language proficiency along the horizontal axis (low proficiency to high proficiency). As can be seen, the person’s most used and most proficient language at the time was La (French). Her other language, Lb (English), was used slightly less frequently and she was slightly less proficient in it, although the level was still very high. This explains why its position is just below and to the left. She also knew a third language, Lc (German), but not very well, and she used it rarely. This person was clearly bilingual in English and French, on both factors, language use and language proficiency, and like many other bilinguals, she also had some knowledge of another language but rarely used it. Note that in this type of presentation, the position of each language can be based either on self‐assessment ratings, as in this case, or on the results of more objective tests.
Figure 1.1 Describing a bilingual in terms of language use and language proficiency at two moments in time: at ages 24 and 34.
This grid approach does not take into account certain aspects such as domains of language use, but it can show language evolution over time, as we will see below, and it can be used for each of the bilingual’s language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is often the case that the proficiency bilinguals have in the four skills is not the same for their different languages: some may have good listening abilities in a language but poor speaking abilities since they do not speak the language often; others may have oral skills in a language (speaking, listening) but may not know how to write and read it, etc.
A few years after the grid approach was proposed for the first time by Grosjean, two other researchers, Luk and Bialystok (2013), provided statistical evidence that bilingual experience does indeed involve at least two dimensions, language use (they call it bilingual usage) and language proficiency, and that these dimensions are not mutually exclusive. These variables are the first building blocks of the description of the bilingual to which others need to be added, as we will see in this chapter.
The knowledge bilinguals have of their languages, and the use they make of them, do not remain static over the years. Such life events as moving to another region or country, meeting a partner, or losing a family member with whom one spoke a language exclusively, will change the pattern of knowledge and use of a language, and may be the reason for acquiring a new language or losing a language. To illustrate this evolution, we present in the bottom part of Figure 1.1 the languages of the same person but ten years later. If a language has changed position in the grid, an arrow indicates the cell it has moved to. As for the new languages, they are circled. Both La (French) and Lb (English) have remained in the same position, but because this person has moved to a German‐speaking region, Lc (German) is now used daily and its proficiency has increased. In addition, two new languages have been acquired: Ld (Spanish), which is quite well known but is not used much, and Le (Swiss German), which is used almost daily but is not yet well known. In Grosjean (2010) five grids were needed to account for the wax and wane of the languages of a 60 year old bilingual who immigrated at various points in his life.
A bilingual’s language history will reveal many features that will ultimately have an impact on language processing. We will want to know which languages were acquired, when and how, whether the cultural context was the same or different, what the pattern of proficiency and use was over the years, which language went through restructuring under the influence of another, stronger, language, and whether some languages became dormant or entered attrition. In addition, we need to know whether the bilingual is currently going through a moment of language stability or of language change where a language may suddenly acquire new importance whilst another may have less of a role to play. These transition periods, which can last several years, must be taken into account when choosing bilinguals to be participants in experiments. Language history information is usually obtained through the use of a detailed questionnaire such as The Language History Questionnaire (Li, Sepanski, and Zhao 2006). Topics that it covers, for each new language, are the age the bilingual started to learn it and the situation in which it took place, how the person acquired it (in the classroom or by interacting with other people), the age at which individual skills started being acquired in the language (speaking, reading, etc.), how many years were spent learning it, which countries the person lived in, and the length of stay there. It is by means of such tools that researchers are able to obtain values for explanatory (independent) variables such as age of acquisition of a language, length of exposure to a language, age of onset of active bilingualism, etc.
Functions of Languages
The linguistics, and especially the sociolinguistics, of bilingualism have long been interested in the functions of languages in bilinguals and, in particular, in language choice. More than half a century ago, Uriel Weinreich (1953) wrote that many bilinguals are accustomed to discuss some topics in only one of their languages and that if children study certain subjects in a unilingual school, they will have difficulty in discussing their “learned” topics in the other language. A few years later, Mackey (1962) also gave considerable importance to function, in other words, what bilinguals use their languages for. He divided these into external functions (language use in various situations and domains) and internal functions (the non‐communicative uses of language such as counting, praying, dreaming, etc.).
Based on the fact that not all facets of life in bilinguals require the same language (people would not be bilingual if that were so), nor that they always demand two languages, Grosjean (1997) proposed the Complementarity Principle, which he defined as follows: “Bilinguals usually acquire and use their languages for different purposes, in different domains of life, with different people. Different aspects of life require different languages.” In order to visualize it, he used the kind of illustration that is shown in Figure 1.2. Each quadrilateral represents a domain of life such as work/studies, home, family, shopping, leisure, administrative matters, holidays, clothes, sports, transportation, health, politics, etc. As can be seen, the person depicted, a trilingual in languages a, b, and c, uses language a (La) in seven domains of life, Lb in three domains, both La and Lb in five domains, and all three languages (La, Lb, and Lc) in just one domain. Some domains, therefore, are specific to one language (ten in all) and others are shared by two or three languages (six in all). Any bilingual can be characterized in this way and will have a pattern that is specific to him or her.
Figure 1.2 The domains covered by a bilingual’s three languages.
The principle has a direct impact on language proficiency. If a language is spoken in a reduced number of domains and with a limited number of people, then it will not be developed as much as a language used in more domains and with more people. In the latter case, there will be an increase in specific vocabularies, stylistic varieties, discursive and pragmatic rules, etc. It is precisely because the need and use of the languages are usually quite different that bilinguals do not develop equal and total proficiency in all their languages. This is also true for the different language skills, such as reading and writing.
Grosjean (2016) reviews studies that have started to obtain data on language use in different domains of life by individual bilinguals. He also describes psycholinguistic studies in the areas of perception, production, and memory in which the impact of the principle is shown; see, for example, Carroll and Luna (2011). As concerns language acquisition, Bialystok et al. (2010) tested the English receptive vocabulary of a very large number of monolingual and bilingual children whose school language was English. They found that monolingual children outperformed bilingual children when tested in just one language. To try to understand this finding, they examined the results by domain: the school domain and the home domain. The difference they found between monolinguals and bilinguals was maintained in the home domain since bilingual children used their other language at home and hence did not know English home words as well. However, in the school domain, a domain where English was used by both groups, the monolingual and bilingual children had the same amount of receptive vocabulary. In sum, different aspects of life, be it in children or adults, often require different languages, whereas other domains are covered by both languages.
Language Dominance
One of the more difficult concepts in the field of bilingualism is language dominance: Is it based on proficiency? On use? On both proficiency and use? On the ability to read and write a language? On when the languages were acquired? Many specialists such as Flege, MacKay, and Piske (2002) put the emphasis on proficiency – objective proficiency (as it is evaluated by researchers) and subjective proficiency (as it is reported by the bilinguals themselves). However, other specialists do not limit dominance to just proficiency. For example, in a book dedicated to the issue, Silva‐Corvalán and Treffers‐Daller (2016) define a dominant language as that in which a bilingual has attained an overall higher level of proficiency at a given age and/or the language that the person uses more frequently, across a wider range of domains.
Researchers have long tried to measure dominance. Among the more objective assessment tools used, one finds language evaluation measures by outside judges (including pronunciation evaluation), as well as different behavioral tasks. From the various measures obtained, specialists give their subjects a dominance rating: the person is dominant in language A or dominant in language B or balanced in both languages (if such a person exists). However, these various approaches have been criticized for reducing the complexity of the bilingual’s language behavior to a number of simple laboratory tasks often given in just one language. In addition, the cut‐off point in the results of a particular task to separate dominant from balanced bilinguals is arbitrary. It is also the case that many people use more than two languages in their everyday life, which complexifies things even more.
On the self‐assessment side, bilinguals are given language background questionnaires that include, among other things, self‐assessment scales for language proficiency and language use for their two or more languages. For example, in the Bilingual Dominance Scale proposed by Dunn and Fox Tree (2009), a number of questions pertain to the onset of bilingualism (when the languages were learned and when the respondent started feeling comfortable speaking each language), some deal with language use, and others concern accent, proficiency, the country/region the bilingual lives in, etc.
If we only concentrate on language use, questionnaires such as this one may produce a global measure of dominance and may confirm, for example, that the bilingual depicted in Figure 1.2 is globally dominant in La, which covers more domains (13 domains counting shared domains) than Lb (9 domains counting shared domains). However, the problem with global dominance is that it does not take into account that some domains are specific to a language. Thus, even though the bilingual in the figure is globally dominant in La, we see that there are three domains in which she uses Lb exclusively. With adequate assessment tools, it would probably be fairly easy to show that this bilingual is dominant in Lb in these domains.
One final point needs to be made about dominance. Grosjean (2010) describes a person whose dominance has changed four times over a stretch of some fifty years, with two periods, both some ten years long, where the second language was the person’s dominant language. One should be careful, therefore, not to assume that people’s first language or “mother tongue” is automatically their dominant language. People’s personal language history may show quite different bilingual configurations at different moments in time.
Language Mode
When interacting with others, bilinguals have to ask themselves two questions: first, “Which language should be used?” and, second, “Should the other language be brought in?” The answer to the first question leads to language choice, that is, choosing a base language for the exchange. It is governed by a number of factors: the interlocutor(s) involved, the situation, the content of the discourse and the function of the interaction. Language choice is a well‐learned behavior (a bilingual rarely asks the conscious question, “Which language should I be using with this person?”) but it is also a very complex phenomenon that only becomes apparent when it breaks down. Usually, bilinguals go through their daily interactions with others quite unaware of the many psychological and sociolinguistic factors that interact to help choose one language over another. We should note that the base language can change several times during a short span of time if it needs to (see Grosjean 2010, 2013).
As concerns the second question (“Should the other language be brought in?”), if the answer is “no”, then the other language remains inactive. This is called the monolingual language mode and it occurs when a bilingual is speaking to a monolingual adult or child, listening to only one language being used (e.g., on radio), reading in a particular language, etc. If, on the other hand, the answer is “yes”, as when the bilingual is speaking to another bilingual who shares his/her languages and who accepts to use both, often intermingling them, then the other language is activated but less so than the base language. The person is then in a bilingual mode. Other examples where the bilingual mode is required are listening to two bilinguals who are mixing languages, interpreting from one language to another, doing an experimental study that requires the two languages, either overtly or covertly, and so on. In between these two endpoints of the continuum, bilinguals can find themselves in various intermediary modes, depending on the situation, the topic, the interlocutors, etc.
Language mode is the state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms at a given point in time (Grosjean 2008). Bilinguals differ as to how much they move along the continuum, some remaining in a monolingual mode for long periods of time or in a bilingual mode, whilst others move back and forth between the endpoints. This movement can take place at any time and in any place. Since language mode can change frequently, it means that the bilingual’s processing system is dynamic and can operate in different activation states. Whether processing is selective (only one language is used) or non‐selective (several languages are involved) will depend on the activation levels of the languages, which in turn depend on a number of internal and external factors.
Interacting in One or Several Languages
When in a monolingual mode, bilinguals adopt the language of the monolingual interlocutor(s) and deactivate their other language(s) as completely as possible. Those who manage to do so totally and, in addition, who speak the other language fluently and have no foreign accent in it, will often “pass” as monolinguals. Although such cases are relatively rare, it is precisely these that have led people to think that bilinguals are (or should be) two monolinguals in one person. In fact, deactivation is rarely total as is clearly seen in the interferences bilinguals produce. An interference is a deviation from the language being spoken (or written) due to the influence of the other language(s). Interferences can occur at all levels of language (phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic), in production and perception, in all modalities (spoken, written, or sign), and in all language modes. Examples of interferences produced by a French person speaking English are as follows. At the phonetic level, pronouncing Sank evven for dees instead of Thank heaven for this; at the lexical level, using corns (from French cornes) instead of horns in Look at the corns on that animal!; at the syntactic level, saying I saw this on the page five (instead of on page five); and in writing, misspelling adress or appartment (based on the French adresse and appartement).
Interferences must be distinguished from intralanguage deviations such as overgeneralizations (e.g., taking irregular verbs and treating them as if they were regular), simplifications (dropping pluralization and tense markers, omitting function words, simplifying the syntax, etc.), as well as hypercorrections and the avoidance of certain words and expressions. These are often due to a low or medium level of proficiency in a language and not to the direct influence of the other language, as in the case of interferences. Both types of deviations, although sometimes quite apparent (such as a foreign accent), usually do not interfere with communication in the long run. This is because bilinguals develop their languages to the level of proficiency required by the environment. Deviations in bilingual speech are thus of the same nature as slips of the tongue and hesitation phenomena. They are present but do not usually affect communication.
Interferences, also termed “transfers” by many, are of two types. There are static interferences that reflect permanent traces of one language on the other (a permanent accent, the meaning extensions of particular words, specific syntactic structures, etc.) and are linked to the person’s competence in the language in question. It has been proposed to reserve the name “transfer” for these static interferences (Grosjean 2012). The other type are dynamic interferences, which are the ephemeral intrusions of the other language (as in the case of the accidental slip on the stress pattern of a word due to the stress rules of the other language, the momentary use of a syntactic structure taken from the language not being spoken, etc.). Dynamic interferences are linked to processing and have to be accounted for by encoding mechanisms. Bilinguals often report making interferences when they are tired, stressed, or emotional since what is normally under control can break down under these conditions.
In a bilingual mode, bilinguals interact with one another. As we saw, they first adopt a language to use together, what is known as the “base language” (also the “host” or “matrix” language). Once it has been chosen, bilinguals can bring in the other language (the “guest” or “embedded” language) in various ways. One of these is to code‐switch, that is, to shift completely to the other language for a word, a phrase, or a sentence. For example, Va chercher Marc and bribe him avec un chocolat chaud with cream on top(Go get Marc and bribe him with a hot chocolate with cream on top). Code‐switching has long been stigmatized and has been given a number of pejorative names such as Franglais (the switching between French and English) or Tex‐Mex (the switching between English and Spanish in the southwestern part of the United States). The consequence of this has been that some bilinguals never switch while others restrict it to situations in which they will not be stigmatized for doing so.
Although looked down upon for a long time, code‐switching is slowly being recognized as a normal mode of communication to convey linguistic and social information among bilinguals and is receiving considerable attention from researchers (e.g., Gardner‐Chloros 2009). For example, sociolinguists concentrate on when and why switching takes place in the social context, linguists seek to study the types of code‐switches that occur (single words, phrases, clauses, sentences, etc.), as well as the linguistic constraints that govern their appearance, and psycholinguists examine how they are processed.
The other way bilinguals can bring in the other, less activated, language is to borrow a word or short expression from that language and to adapt it morphologically (and often phonologically) into the base language. Thus, unlike code‐switching, which is the juxtaposition of two languages, borrowing is the integration of one language into another. Most often both the form and the content of a word are borrowed (to produce what has been called a loanword or more simply a borrowing), as in the following example taken from a French–English bilingual: “Ca m'étonnerait qu’on ait code‐switché autant que ça” (I can’t believe we code‐switched as often as that). Here, the English words “code‐switch” has been brought in and integrated into the French sentence. A second type of borrowing, called a loanshift, consists in either taking a word in the base language and extending its meaning to correspond to that of a word in the other language or rearranging words in the base language along a pattern provided by the other language and thus creating a new meaning. An example of the first kind would be the use of “humoroso” by Portuguese–Americans to mean “humorous” when the original meaning is “capricious”. An example of the second kind is the use of idiomatic expressions that are translated literally from the other language, such as “I put myself to think about it” said by a Spanish–English bilingual, based on “Me puse a pensarlo”. It is important to distinguish idiosyncratic loans (also called “speech borrowings” or “nonce borrowings”) from words that have become part of a language community’s vocabulary and that monolinguals also use (called “language borrowings” or “established loans”). Research examines, among other things, the differences and similarities that exist between code‐switches and borrowings (and, within the latter, between idiosyncratic borrowings and established borrowings), as well as the impact of the two on language itself, such as first‐ and second‐language restructuring, as well as upon language processing.
Biculturalism
Bilingualism and biculturalism are not automatically coextensive. You can find bilinguals who are not bicultural (e.g., those bilinguals who have lived in just one culture, such as many Dutch people), biculturals who are not bilingual (e.g., British people who have migrated to the United States), as well as people who are both bicultural and bilingual. Biculturals can be characterized in the following way (Grosjean, 2008; Nguyen and Benet‐Martinez 2007): they take part, to varying degrees, in the life of two or more cultures; they adapt, in part at least, their attitudes, behaviors, values, languages, etc., to these cultures; and they combine and blend aspects of the cultures involved. Some aspects are adaptable and controllable, allowing the bicultural to adapt to the context and the situation, whilst others are more static; they are blends of the cultures and cannot be adapted as easily.
Research on speech and language processing is starting to manipulate or control for the biculturalism of participants in observational and experimental studies since many aspects of cognition and language are influenced by biculturalism. One example concerns the bilingual lexicon and the impact biculturalism may have on its organization. A bicultural bilingual will often have different concepts for words that appear to be, at first sight, translation equivalents, for example, “bread” and “pain” in French. For the person who has lived in both the United States and France, “bread” refers to a large loaf baked in a bread pan whereas “pain” refers to the baguette type of bread. The same case can be made for English “coffee” and French “café”. The influence of biculturalism on the nature of the bilingual’s lexicon was acknowledged early on by Weinreich (1953) with the difference he proposed between coordinative and compound bilingualism. In the coordinative type, the meaning of words in the two languages are kept separate (each word has its own meaning) whereas in the compound type, the words share a common meaning. Of course, things are not as clear‐cut and it is now accepted that some aspects of life in different cultures will lead to words with meanings that refer to different cultural underpinnings (as in the examples above), other aspects to words sharing meaning components, and still others to words with totally overlapping meanings. As Pavlenko (2009) states, translation equivalents are not always conceptual equivalents – some words may be in a relationship of partial equivalence and there are words with no conceptual equivalents in the other language.
Thus, biculturalism joins other better‐known features of bilingualism such as language proficiency, use, history, dominance, as well as language activation and mode, not to mention general factors such as age, which may explain, in part at least, how the bilingual’s languages are processed and stored.
Bilingual Children
How Do Children Become Bilingual?
Children have probably been growing up bilingual since the earliest days of contact between different languages. Yet, one of the first documented studies of childhood bilingualism is only 100 years old. Jules Ronjat was a French linguist married to a German woman. Under the recommendation from fellow linguist Maurice Grammont, the couple decided to raise their son Louis bilingual in French and German using the one person–one language approach. Louis’ father spoke to him only in French, while his mother spoke to him only in German. By all accounts this experiment in raising a bilingual child was a success and Louis grew up speaking fluent French and German.
Grammont advised a one person–one language strategy because he believed that it would lead to less “grave confusion and exhausting intellectual effort” (Ronjat 1913, 3). Even in current times, there remains a strong belief that growing up with two languages could be confusing to children. However, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that young bilinguals are confused or that a one person–one language approach is needed to prevent confusion. Even newborn infants exposed to two languages prenatally can tell their languages apart based on simple rhythmic differences (Byers‐Heinlein, Burns, and Werker 2010). While some parents of bilingual children follow a one person–one language approach, there are a myriad of ways in which children successfully grow up bilingual. There is no need to separate a bilingual child’s languages by person, place, or time, because children are highly flexible language learners.
Children grow up bilingual under many different circumstances. They might be born into bilingual families, where the parents speak different languages, and one or both parents is themselves bilingual. Some parents choose caregiving arrangements or educational opportunities that expose their children to a second language, such as hiring a nanny who speaks a particular language or enrolling their children in language immersion programs at school. Many children grow up in multilingual communities, where nearly everybody speaks several languages. Immigration is another common reason for childhood bilingualism and children from immigrant families often learn one language at home and another language outside of the home. Finally, some children acquire three or more languages and others, rather than learning distinct languages, are exposed to two varieties of the same language.
Even with ongoing exposure to two or more languages, not all bilingual children will grow up to be active bilinguals. Annick De Houwer (2007) conducted a study with nearly 2000 families of bilingual children who were between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The families lived in Flanders, an officially Dutch‐speaking region of Belgium. All children went to school using Dutch and were exposed to a language other than Dutch at home from one or more family members. De Houwer wanted to understand which of these children had continued to use both Dutch as well as their home language as they grew up. She found that while all the children spoke Dutch, only 75% of the children actively spoke their other language. The children who had at least one parent (preferably two) who spoke only the second language at home were those most likely to retain that language, while children with more family members who spoke Dutch at home were least likely to retain their other language. Despite all children receiving regular exposure to both languages, there were large individual differences as to whether both languages continued to be actively used.
A language’s status as a minority or majority language can have a big impact on whether bilingual children will grow up to use this language. A majority language is a language used by most of the population and is often recognized by the government as an official language. In contrast, a minority language is only spoken by a small percentage of a population and may or may not be officially recognized. It is sometimes called a heritage language, particularly if it is learned primarily at home as a first language. Children almost always acquire a community’s majority language (Dutch in De Houwer’s study), but successfully acquiring a minority language is more precarious, especially as majority language peers grow to have a larger influence than parents.
Language acquisition in childhood often follows a use‐it or lose‐it principle. Languages that do not continue to be heard or spoken are lost through a process called language attrition, which can happen to either the first or to later‐learned languages. However, there is some exciting new evidence that, although not readily accessible, traces of these lost languages remain in the brain. A group of researchers studied 9–17 year old children in Quebec who had been adopted from China around age 1 year (Pierce et al. 2014). The children had spoken only French since adoption. Researchers had these children try to discriminate between different Chinese tones. The adoptees showed a brain response similar to Chinese/French bilinguals and different from French monolinguals with no exposure to Chinese. Despite having no overt recollection of Chinese and no exposure to the language for at least 12 years, their brains still showed a special ability to process the language. Despite their brain’s residual sensitivity to the Chinese sounds, these children’s inability to actually speak Chinese shows how an early‐learned language can quickly become inaccessible.
Quantity and Quality of Language Exposure
While all children are exposed to at least one native language from birth, bilingual children vary widely as to the age at which they begin acquiring additional languages. Some children, called simultaneous bilinguals or crib bilinguals, grow up from birth with two native languages. Other children, known as sequential bilinguals or childhood second language learners, learn a first language from birth and a second language sometime later in childhood. What is the dividing line between simultaneous and sequential bilingualism? Is a bilingual child who begins hearing both languages the day of birth different from one who begins hearing a second language at age 2 months? What about 6 months? Three years? This question has no simple answer. We should note that researchers who study very young children often use the term “simultaneous bilinguals” specifically for those who have encountered both languages regularly from the first few days of life.
In our discussion of bilingual adults, we identified language proficiency and language use as two important factors for describing their bilingualism. However, these same factors do not always make sense in the context of younger bilinguals. Infants have very limited language proficiency and do not “use” their languages in the same way as adults do. Instead, young bilinguals are usually characterized according to their exposure to different languages. Language exposure can be measured via parental report questionnaires, such as that developed by Bosch and Sebastián‐Gallés (2001). An interviewer walks a parent through a typical day in a child’s life, estimating the number of hours the child has heard each language and from which caregivers. Separate estimates are made for weekdays and weekends, and for different months of the child’s life as caregiving arrangements change. Based on this interview, the researcher calculates an estimate of the percentage of time that the child has heard each language both currently and across his or her lifetime, and whether the child is best characterized as a simultaneous or a sequential bilingual.
In a research context, estimates of language exposure are often used to determine whether or not a child should be considered bilingual. As Byers‐Heinlein (2015) has documented, studies vary widely as to the minimum exposure for which a child is considered bilingual, but most studies require a minimum of 25–30% exposure to each language. It is not well‐established what minimum amount of exposure is necessary for a child to learn two languages and as children grow older, other factors including language proficiency and use come to outweigh the simple effects of exposure.
Despite its usefulness in studies of young bilinguals, percentage exposure to each language is likely to be an overly simplistic characterization of early language environments. For example, a child with talkative parents and teachers is likely to hear a lot more words and sentences in a given language than a child who spends time with less talkative interlocutors. Children who hear a greater quality of language show faster vocabulary growth and language processing (Weisleder and Fernald 2013
