Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals

An Introduction

Annette M.B. de Groot

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848729018
• eBook ISBN: 9781136897221
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Psycholinguistics – the field of science that examines the mental processes and knowledge structures involved in the acquisition, comprehension, and production of language – had a strong monolingual orientation during the first four decades following its emergence around 1950. The awareness that a large part of mankind speaks more than one language – that this may impact both on the way each individual language is used and on the thought processes of bilinguals and multilinguals, and that, consequently, our theories on human linguistic ability and its role in non-linguistic cognition are incomplete and, perhaps, false – has led to a steep growth of studies on bilingualism and multilingualism since around 1995.

This textbook introduces the reader to the field of study that examines language acquisition, comprehension and production from the perspective of the bilingual and multilingual speaker. It furthermore provides an introduction to studies that investigate the implications of being bilingual on various aspects of non-linguistic cognition. The major topics covered are the development of language in children growing up in a bilingual environment either from birth or relatively soon after, late foreign language learning, and word recognition, sentence comprehension, speech production, and translation processes in bilinguals. Furthermore, the ability of bilinguals and multilinguals to generally produce language in the "intended" language is discussed, as is the cognitive machinery that enables this. Finally, the consequences of bilingualism and multilingualism for non-linguistic cognition and findings and views regarding the biological basis of bilingualism and multilingualism are presented.

The textbook's primary readership are students and researchers in Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, but teachers of language and translators and interpreters who wish to become better informed on the cognitive and biological basis of bilingualism and multilingualism will also benefit from it.

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Introduction and Preview

Bilingualism has become an omnipresent phenomenon in our modern society of large-scale migration, international markets and finance, backpacking youngsters, and a scientific community in need of a lingua franca to disseminate its achievements among its members. The awareness that bilingualism is not at all exceptional any more and may not have been so for a long time has recently led to a steep growth in the number of studies on the implications of being bilingual for language use and cognition in general. This book brings together the results of many of these studies. It presents the theories and views on bilingualism that motivated these studies and emerged from them, but it also explains the research methods and tasks that were used to address these theories and views in specific experiments. Because of this latter feature this book qualifies as an introduction to the study of bilingualism. However, it presupposes some basic knowledge of the research area of cognitive psychology and, specifically, the psychology of language (or “psycholinguistics”). The issues that will be dealt with are largely based on those addressed in the study of psycholinguistics, but they are approached from the perspective of bilingual language users.

In this introduction I will first describe what psycholinguistics is about and show how it has provided the basis for the study of bilingualism. Next I will present the colorful variety of language users who are all called bilingual. I will then introduce a number of central themes in the study of bilingualism and, hence, in this book. This will be followed by a brief section on conventional nomenclature in the field and I will conclude with a brief preview of the chapters to come.

But first some words are in order on the title of this book: “Language and cognition in bilinguals and multilinguals: An introduction”. The vast majority of the studies to be discussed tested bilinguals; that is, people who know and use two languages. Relatively few studies will be included that examined multilinguals—people who know and use three or more languages. This reflects the fact that relatively few of these studies have been conducted and reported. Because of the unbalance between bilingual and multilingual studies, I considered the alternative, smoother, title “Language and cognition in bilinguals: An introduction”, but for a couple reasons I decided against it. The first is simply that it would not do justice to that fact that some multilingual studies are in fact included. But a more principled reason is that the theories, processes, and mechanisms that will be dealt with apply, I believe, to both bilingualism and multilingualism. A multilingual language system is potentially noisier than a bilingual language system, but the mental processes and mechanisms that handle this increased level of noise are presumably no different from those involved in dealing with the extra noise in a bilingual system as compared with a monolingual system. To the extent that these claims are true, this book is as much about multilingualism as it is about bilingualism, and in many places where I talk about bilinguals and bilingualism one might take these to imply multilinguals and multilingualism as well. Furthermore, as we shall see below, some people considered bilingual according to one definition of bilingualism may be considered multilingual by another (because they also possess some knowledge of at least one further language and can put it to effective use, which counts as an additional language for one theorist but not another). Finally, it is not unusual to call a particular study a bilingual one because two specific languages of the participants are being examined while the fact is ignored that the participants might also possess at least some basic knowledge of one or more other languages.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND THE STUDY OF BILINGUALISM

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that connects the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. Briefly, linguistics is the field of science that describes the knowledge that underlies language, whereas psychology is the field of science that explains behavior in terms of mental processes. Psycholinguistics combines these two orientations by examining the mental processes and types of knowledge involved in understanding and producing language, in both its oral and written forms. In other words, it deals with the linguistic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, trying to discover the cognitive machinery and knowledge structures that underlie these skills and what role they play in linguistic behavior. In addition, psycholinguistics is concerned with how we acquire these skills.

While exhibiting any of the above-mentioned four skills, the language user makes use of knowledge units of various different types, each of them relating to a separate domain of linguistic study: phonology, morphology, syntax or grammar, vocabulary, orthography, and pragmatics. Phonological units (“phonemes”) are the smallest sound units of a language and the corresponding field of study (phonology) attempts to discover the sound system of a language; that is, what sounds it contains and how these combine into larger sound units. Morphological units (“morphemes”) are the smallest linguistic units that bear meaning and the corresponding field of study (morphology) investigates the way these meaning units can combine into words. Syntactical knowledge is knowledge about the way words can combine into sentences and the corresponding domain of study (syntax) tries to identify the rule system that underlies permissible word order and sentence structure in a language. A language user’s vocabulary consists of all the words he or she knows. Knowing a word minimally involves knowing its spoken form and its meaning, but for literate language users it also implies knowing how it is spelt. A word’s spelling is called its “orthography”, but this name is also used for spelling in general (especially in alphabetic writing systems, in which the orthographic units, the letters, represent phonemes). In addition it is used to refer to the field of study that investigates the rules of spelling of a language—how exactly orthographic units map onto phonological units. Finally, pragmatics concerns the study of how people use language differently in different contexts, taking world knowledge and knowledge about the specific communicative circumstances into account in choosing the exact wording. They might, for instance, use slang words when interacting with their peers in an informal setting but choose more formal vocabulary when talking to their superiors, or they might choose to use some indirect form of language such as irony to maximize the communicative effect. Whereas linguistics is primarily concerned with describing these various sources of knowledge, psycholinguistics focuses on how we exploit them in using language.

In addition to discovering how language is acquired and used, psycholinguistics tries to discover the relation between language and nonlinguistic cognition, specifically the relation between language and thought. Across the centuries, various views on the relation between language and thought have been advanced, such as the idea that thought is internal speech, that language is a tool to communicate thought, that language guides thought, and that language influences thought (see Whitney, 1998, for an overview). The view that language influences thought also incorporates the idea that specific languages influence thought in specific ways, with the effect that speakers of different languages might think and perceive the world differently.

Even now, psycholinguistics is characterized by a strong monolingual bias: The participants who are asked to perform some language task in some experiment are typically native speakers of the test language and it is implicitly assumed— possibly mistakenly—that they lack knowledge of any other language(s). Alternatively, the investigators might be well aware that the participants might speak one or more other languages in addition to their native language, or that they are native speakers of two languages, but this possibility is simply ignored or taken for granted.

The monolingual orientation of psycholinguistics has arguably led to an incomplete conception, possibly even a false one, of human linguistic ability and language processing, because knowing more than one language may have an impact on the way each individual one of them is mentally represented and processed. If forced to single out the most salient result emerging from the study of bilingualism/multilingualism to date, I would choose the ubiquitous effect of the language(s) currently not in use on the one selected for current use. In addition, acquiring a new language is influenced by prior knowledge not only of the first language but of all further languages of which the learner has at least some knowledge. A further consequence of the monolingual bias in psycholinguistics is that not all means have been exploited to become informed on the relation between language and thought: If specific languages influence thought in specific ways, a person who masters more than one language may live in different worlds of thought depending on the language currently used. Alternatively, this person’s way of thinking may be based on a merger of the worlds of thought associated with the separate language he or she speaks.

The insight that, as compared with monolingualism, bilingualism may alter language acquisition, representation, and processing as well as thought (and, as we shall see, other aspects of non-linguistic cognition), has in recent years led to a steep rise in studies on language use and cognition in speakers of more than one language. In this book I discuss many of these studies and attempt to integrate the wide range of miscellaneous findings that have emerged from the various sub-disciplines within this field of study into a coherent whole. The study of bilingualism deals with largely the same topics and the same linguistic domains and skills as covered by traditional psycholinguistics, and can therefore be regarded a branch of psycholinguistics. But because the study of bilingualism has only quite recently started to gain momentum it has not yet grown as many branches as its source, traditional psycholinguistics, and some of the sub-areas that have started to emerge have not yet had the chance to develop into anything more than a tender twig.

The study of bilingualism can be dissected into three main areas of study that map directly onto the three main lines of study within traditional psycholinguistics. The first examines how language users understand (or comprehend) language input; the second how they produce language output. The main difference between the traditional psycholinguistic studies and the bilingual studies is that only the latter address these topics from the bilingual perspective, testing bilinguals and posing the question of how the fact that they speak more than one language influences the way they process language. The third main line of study is language acquisition and can be divided into two sub-areas. One of them deals with the simultaneous acquisition of two languages from birth and how it compares with acquiring just one language. The second is concerned with acquiring a second language after afirst one is already partly or fully in place.

As mentioned above, language comprehension and production both occur in two modalities depending on the nature of the input and output: speech or writing. Taking both dimensions of classification (comprehension/production; speech/writing) into account, four linguistic skills can be distinguished: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The first three of these have established a clear presence on the agenda of bilingualism researchers, but studies on the writing skills of bilinguals are still sparse. Another noteworthy feature of the state of the art in bilingualism research is that relatively many of both the comprehension and the production studies that have been performed have investigated the processing of words instead of larger linguistic units such as complete sentences or texts. For example, the majority of the bilingual speech production studies conducted so far have examined the production of single words out of context. Finally, looking at the current state of the study of bilingualism from the viewpoint of the various types of linguistic knowledge distinguished above, it appears that (aspects of) vocabulary, phonology, and syntax have received ample attention while studies on morphology and pragmatics are still rare. The content of this book reflects this imbalance.

DEFINING AND CLASSIFYING BILINGUALS

Which language users count as bilinguals? An obvious and common answer to this question is that any person who speaks more than one language is a bilingual, but this answer does not take into account the wide range of differences between individuals who fit that definition. For instance, it does not do justice to the fact that one can speak a language at different levels of fluency. Does the above definition imply that the level of fluency in both languages is nativelike or does it allow for lower levels of fluency in one of the languages or perhaps in both and, if, so, what minimal level would be required to be included? Is this minimum level of fluency required for all of the four linguistic skills distinguished earlier or does it suffice, for instance, to be able to just speak in both languages or to just read in both languages? In fact, in bilingualism research a wide range of more specific definitions of bilingualism can be encountered. These vary from only considering a person bilingual if he or she masters two languages at the same level of fluency and with the same level of control as native speakers of the two languages—as if a bilingual person is two monolinguals in one person—to regarding people who only possess some minimal competence in one of the four linguistic skills as bilingual. According to the first of these definitions the bilingual population is a very small one, if only because of the fact that the language selected for current use is influenced by all of the other languages known by this speaker (see above). According to the second definition even people who are in an initial stage of second language learning count as bilingual.

Bilinguals are classified according to a number of dimensions (see e.g., Butler & Hakuta, 2004; Hamers & Blanc, 1989). Each of these dimensions will be explained briefly here and detailed further elsewhere in this book. One of them is a classification according to their relative competence in both languages. So-called “balanced bilinguals” possess similar degrees of proficiency in both languages, whereas “dominant bilinguals” (or “unbalanced bilinguals”) are those with a higher level of proficiency in one language than in the other. Balanced bilingualism does not necessarily imply a high competence in both languages. For instance, a child who masters two languages to equal degrees is said to be a balanced bilingual even though in neither language has he or she reached full competence yet. Therefore a further distinction to make is according to the level of fluency or proficiency in, especially, the second language. Bilinguals who have attained a (near-) native level of proficiency in this language are called “proficient bilinguals”; those who have not are called “non-proficient bilinguals”.

Three other dimensions concern the age at which second language acquisition starts (the so called “age of acquisition” variable), the way words and their meanings are organized in bilingual memory, and the social status of each of the languages. The age of acquisition dimension splits up the bilingual population into “early” and “late” bilinguals. Early bilinguals are those who acquired both languages in childhood, whereas late bilinguals became bilingual beyond childhood. In its turn, early bilingualism is divided into early “simultaneous” and early “consecutive” or “sequential” bilingualism. Early simultaneous bilinguals have been exposed to both languages from birth, whereas early consecutive/sequential bilinguals have first been exclusively exposed to one language, their native language, and from some later point in time during early childhood have started to receive bilingual input. In some classifications late bilingualism is also split up into two sub-groups—adolescent and adult bilingualism. This subdivision relates to the view, held by some scientists in the field, that adolescence marks a critical boundary in language-learning ability.

The classification that splits up bilingualism according to bilingual memory organization distinguishes between “compound”, “coordinate”, and “subordinative” bilingualism. In bilinguals of the compound type the two word forms of a translation-equivalent word pair map onto one and the same meaning representation in memory, whereas in coordinate bilinguals each term in such a word pair maps onto a separate meaning representation. In subordinative bilingualism, as in compound bilingualism, there is also just one meaning representation for both elements of a translation-equivalent word pair, but this time the word form of the weaker language does not map directly onto this meaning representation but via the word form of the stronger language. These three forms of bilingualism have been related to different contexts of acquisition. For instance, it has been hypothesized that compound bilingualism emerges when a child grows up in a home where the two languages are spoken interchangeably, and that coordinate bilingualism emerges when there is a strict separation in the use of the two languages.

A division that splits up bilinguals according to the status of their two languages is one between “additive bilinguals” and “subtractive bilinguals”. Additive bilingualism is thought to arise in circumstances wherein both languages are socially valued, whereas subtractive bilingualism results from a situation in which one of them, usually the child’s native language, is devalued in his or her environment and there is social pressure not to use it. Additive bilingualism is considered to be beneficial for cognition and cognitive development, whereas subtractive bilingualism is thought to hamper them. The distinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism has also been referred to as one between “elite” and “folk” bilingualism, respectively.

This enumeration of dimensions according to which bilinguals can be categorized is by no means exhaustive (see Butler & Hakuta, 2004, and Hamers & Blanc, 1989, for further divisions) but will do to make the point that the bilingual community are a colorful lot. One should therefore think twice before generalizing a conclusion based on the results of a study testing bilinguals of a ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and Preview
• 2 Early Bilingualism and Age of Acquisition Effects on (First and) Second Language Learning
• 3 Late Foreign Vocabulary Learning and Lexical Representation
• 4 Comprehension Processes: Word Recognition and Sentence Processing
• 5 Word Production and Speech Accents
• 6 Language Control
• 7 Cognitive Consequences of Bilingualism and Multilingualism
• 8 Bilingualism and the Brain
• Glossary
• References
• Author index
• Subject index