Bilingualism Across the Lifespan

Opportunities and Challenges for Cognitive Research in a Global Society

Wendy S. Francis, Wendy S. Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351387026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Bilingualism Across the Lifespan explores the opportunities and challenges that are inherent in conducting cognitive research in an increasingly global and multilingual society.

Divided into three sections, the book highlights the multifaceted and complex nature of bilingualism. The first section focuses on what every cognitive psychologist ought to know about bilingualism: the impact of bilingualism on cognition across the lifespan, the idea that bilinguals are not a special case, and the importance of bilingualism in cognitive research beyond language. The second section focuses on challenges inherent in bilingual research: diversity of bilingual experience, the assessment of proficiency, and finding matched comparison groups and materials. Finally, the book considers opportunities that are created when bilingualism is incorporated into the cognitive research enterprise. It illustrates how researchers of bilingualism leverage theory, methodology, and findings from single-language research, incorporate uniquely bilingual processes or representations, and target populations of bilinguals that help to establish universal properties.

Bringing together leading international contributors, the book provides the reader with a better understanding of the nature of bilingualism and bilingual research as it relates to human cognition. It will be an essential read for all researchers and upper-level students of bilingualism and cognitive psychology more generally.

1
INTRODUCTION TO THE VOLUME

Wendy S. Francis

Introduction

The nature and impact of bilingualism, bilingual experience, and bilingual proficiency have become major foci of investigation in cognitive psychology and language science. Incorporating bilingual participants and materials strategically can also provide a window into other cognitive processes. Even in cognitive or language research where bilingualism is simply an attribute of research participants that is neither targeted nor strategic, it is nevertheless important to understand several aspects of bilingualism and characteristics of bilingual participants (Prior & van Hell, this volume). Indeed, bilingualism has an impact on cognition across the lifespan (Bialystok, this volume).

The aim of this book is to provide the reader with a better understanding of the nature of bilingualism and bilingual research as it relates to human cognition. Collectively, the chapters provide important insights about cognitive approaches that involve bilingual participants and materials. The chapters highlight the multifaceted and complex nature of bilingualism and the critical information that can be obtained by including bilingual dimensions in cognitive research. The contributors to this volume are respected scholars who bring a wealth of experience to the topics they cover and provide informed perspectives on critical issues in bilingual research.

What Every Cognitive Psychologist Should Know About Bilingualism

Globally, bilingualism and multilingualism are normative rather than exceptional (Grosjean, 2010). Much of what we already know about human cognition is based on research with bilingual samples (Prior & van Hell, this volume) and results from countries in which bilingualism is the norm generally parallel those found in monolingual samples. Because of the worldwide prevalence of bilingualism and multilingualism, the treatment of monolingual cognition as the default and bilingualism as a modification of the monolingual system is not an adequate approach (Tiv, Kutlu, & Titone, this volume; Schwartz, this volume).

It has long been established that bilinguals are not like two monolinguals in a single mind (Grosjean, 1989). For one thing, each language influences processing of the other (see Schwartz, this volume), and learning of content transfers across languages via shared conceptual or semantic networks (e.g., Francis, this volume; Francis, 1999). Even false memories (e.g., Marmolejo, Diliberto-Macaluso, & Altarriba, 2009) and the effects of misleading information (Shaw, Garcia, & Robles, 1997) reach across language boundaries.

Second, bilinguals have less experience with each of their two languages than monolinguals have with their only language. One consequence is that bilinguals have a smaller vocabulary in each language relative to monolingual speakers but a larger total vocabulary. Another consequence is that lexical processing for production is slower for bilingual than for monolingual speakers (e.g., Gollan, Montoya, Fennema-Notestine, & Morris, 2005). Not surprisingly, lexical processing is also slower in the less proficient language (e.g., Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984). In auditory comprehension, even early bilinguals have more difficulty recognizing speech in noise relative to monolinguals (e.g., Shi, 2010), and learning a second language reduces speech recognition in noise even in the first language (Weiss & Dempsey, 2008). Third, what may be less obvious than the effects on language and memory is that bilingual experience has an impact even on non-linguistic aspects of cognition. Thus, the bilingual mind is more complex than what would be expected with two monolingual systems in the same mind.

In Chapter 2, Bialystok (this volume) systematically examines the potential impact of bilingualism on cognition from childhood through older adulthood. She builds a nuanced case that, across the lifespan, bilingual individuals have more efficient attentional monitoring processes relative to monolingual individuals but do not have greater ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli. More efficient monitoring has broad implications that range from enhanced metalinguistic awareness in bilingual children to a delay of cognitive decline in bilingual older adults.

In Chapter 3, Tiv, Kutlu, and Titone (this volume) challenge the idea that pure monolinguals should be treated as ideal speakers of a language. Through considerations of language use in interpersonal and broader social contexts, they contend that rather than the default to which bilingualism and multilingualism should be compared, monolingualism is a simplified case of a system that can handle multiple languages.

It is common practice in the United States to exclude bilinguals or non-native English speakers from participation in cognitive research that involves verbal materials. However, in Chapter 4, Prior and van Hell (this volume) provide insights into why this practice is problematic and why it is important to include bilingual participants in basic cognitive research. A key reason is that if bilinguals and monolinguals indeed show different patterns of cognitive performance, then it is important to include them to increase generalizability, but if they are not different, there is no basis to exclude them.

Challenges in Conducting Bilingual Cognitive Research

An important theme throughout the chapters is the multifaceted nature of bilingualism (Morford & Kroll, this volume; Peña, Bedore, & Torres, this volume; Tiv et al., this volume; Wilck & Altarriba, this volume). The chapters emphasize the diversity of bilingual language exposure, usage, experience, and context. This variability indeed poses part of the challenge in research on bilingualism, but it can also provide rich data for individual difference analysis.

Related to this diversity, bilingual proficiency is not categorical in nature, in that each of the multiple dimensions of proficiency varies along a continuum (Peña et al., this volume). At the same time, treating the entire range from monolingualism to fluent bilingualism in a continuous manner presents its own set of challenges, because these dimensions of proficiency are unlikely to be normally distributed. These factors complicate the assessment of proficiency. While there appears to be consensus that objective measures are desirable, it has not been clearly established whether they more accurately predict cognitive performance than self-report measures or how comprehensive such assessments need to be. Also, because languages not required for a cognitive task may nevertheless impact performance (e.g., Schwartz, this volume), ideally proficiency in all known languages would be assessed if possible.

In Chapter 5, Wilck and Altarriba (this volume) explain the diversity of bilingual experience and the complexities of generalization across bilingual populations. They draw attention to the importance of adequately characterizing bilingual samples on several dimensions of their proficiency, experience, and language environments. Because of the multifaceted nature of bilingualism, they caution against generalizing results or interpretations to all bilinguals but rather to qualify findings based on characteristics of the samples studied. Accommodating this diversity in our understanding of bilingual cognition is both a challenge and an opportunity to uncover important individual difference factors that predict language and cognitive performance.

Bilingual research usually requires assessment of language proficiency, which is by its nature complex. In the assessment of bilingual proficiency, the field has not reached consensus on the best approach. In Chapter 6, Peña, Bedore, and Torres (this volume) delineate the pros and cons of different approaches to the assessment of language proficiency and dominance in children and young adults. They make distinctions between receptive (language exposure) and productive (language use) aspects of language proficiency and experience. Both direct and indirect measures of language proficiency and dominance are described. They highlight the importance of selecting proficiency measures carefully to match the purpose of the study.

Many bilingual studies involve comparing performance of different language groups or comparing performance across languages. In Chapter 7, Tokowicz and Degani (this volume) provide an insightful discussion of design challenges in bilingual research. When comparisons are made across languages within a group of bilingual participants, creating materials can be difficult because of the need to match materials across languages. Similarly, when comparisons are made across groups of bilinguals, it is critical to match the language groups being compared as closely as possible on factors other than language experience or proficiency. There are also important considerations for the language context of testing protocols. The authors give guidance on dealing with these complexities.

Opportunities Created by Including Bilingualism in Cognitive Research

As explained by Schwartz (Chapter 9, this volume) and Francis (Chapter 8, this volume), mainstream single-language models of lexical processing or verbal memory can be and have been expanded to incorporate bilingualism or bilingual proficiency. Such expansion allows models to account for performance in a larger proportion of the population, thus increasing generalizability. However, the explanatory power of these models is limited unless they incorporate new and uniquely bilingual representations, processes, or theoretical constructs.

Properties of bilingualism can be leveraged strategically to isolate processes that are difficult to decompose in a single language. With respect to lexical processing and memory, having two distinct word forms associated with the same core concept allows researchers to determine properties or effects associated with these two levels of representation (Francis, this volume). Studying and comparing particular groups of bilinguals also reveals new information, particularly with respect to generalizability (Morford & Kroll, this volume).

In Chapter 8, Francis (this volume) provides a window into how cognitive constructs developed for single-language research can be borrowed and adapted to reason about bilingual language and memory processing. The validity of these approaches is qualified, in that they can be limited in the range of applicable contexts, and uniquely bilingual properties may be required. She illustrates the utility of the approach and its limitations using four applications in bilingual memory.

In Chapter 9, Schwartz (this volume) provides an insightful discussion of how “mainstream” cognitive models based on monolingual lexical processing can be extended to accommodate bilingualism and bilingual proficiency. She points out how these models fall short unless properties unique to bilinguals are incorporated. To illustrate these principles, she characterizes the development of key models and theoretical frameworks for bilingual lexical processing.

In Chapter 10, Morford and Kroll (this volume) consider what can be learned from bimodal bilinguals, those who are proficient in both a spoken language and a signed language. Language processing research with bimodal bilinguals has shown many parallels with findings from bilinguals who are proficient in two spoken languages. With a focus on parallel activation of multiple languages, they draw attention to how the separation of languages across spoken and signed modes allows researchers to identify characteristics of bilingualism that are universal and those that are specific to particular languages or situations.

Conclusions

The chapters to follow delve deeply into what is important to know about bilingualism and the challenges and opportunities associated with conducting bilingual research. They emphasize the prevalence of bilingualism and its impact on cognition, and they provide a novel window into the bilingual cognitive research enterprise with methodological recommendations. The researcher is encouraged to avoid being boxed in by the idea of a monolingual default state. Indeed, a generalizable cognitive theory must consider bilingual and multilingual populations, which often requires uniquely bilingual features. A common theme is that bilingual experience and proficiency are complex, multidimensional constructs that are challenging to operationalize or measure. It also becomes clear that the very factors that make bilingual research challenging open up exciting new opportunities for discovery. I hope that these chapters stimulate new directions for future research on bilingualism, language, and cognition.

References

• Bialystok, E. (this volume). Cognitive effects of bilingualism: An evolving perspective. In W. S. Francis (Ed.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Challenges and opportunities for cognitive research in a global society. New York: Routledge.
• Francis, W. S. (1999). Analogical transfer of problem solutions within and between languages in Spanish: English bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(3), 301–329.
• Francis, W. S. (this volume). Using existing cognitive constructs to better understand bilingual memory. In W. S. Francis (Ed.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Challenges and opportunities for cognitive research in a global society. New York: Routledge.
• Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Fennema-Notestine, C., & Morris, S. K. (2005). Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1220–1234.
• Grosjean, F. (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36(1), 3–15.
• Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Marmolejo, G., Diliberto-Macaluso, K. A., & Altarriba, J. (2009). False memory in bilinguals: Does switching languages increase false memories? American Journal of Psychology, 122(1), 1–16.
• Morford, J. P., & Kroll, J. F. (this volume). Bilingualism in deaf and hearing signers: A window into the dynamics of language variation. In W. S. Francis (Ed.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Challenges and opportunities for cognitive research in a global society. New York: Routledge.
• Peña, E. D., Bedore, L. M., & Torres, J. (this volume). Assessment of language proficiency and dominance in monolinguals and bilinguals. In W. S. Francis (Ed.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Challenges and opportunities for cognitive resea...