PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Language Acquisition: Bilinugalism

Contexts Contexts of childhood bilingualism Distinction is a little arbitrary, no hard and fast rules Simultaneous bilingualism - when learn both languages at same time (although there is variability in definitions here) Typically when children are in a community (including a home) that is bilingual Sequential bilingualism - when learn second language after acquiring the native language Commonly called second-language acquisition. Occurs in a variety of different circumstances

Sequential bilingualism Video Questions: Does acquisition/learning proceed in the same way the second time through? Many different opinions: May depend on the age of the learner May depend on the threshold of what you count as similar vs. different What’s the best method for learning/teaching a second language

Activity Determine who or what is the one performing the action. The waitress pushes the cowboys. The telephones pushes the cowboys. Kisses the table the apple. The baskets the teacher kicks. As a native speaker of English we can use many cues: Word order Animacy Verb agreement Not all languages use the same cues to the same extent e.g., German doesn’t rely as much on word order, but relies more on agreement processes

Activity Determine who or what is the one performing the action. The waitress pushes the cowboys. The telephones pushes the cowboys. Kisses the table the apple. The baskets the teacher kicks. Kilborn (1989, 1994) Found that bilinguals (English as second language) typically carry over the dominant processing strategies from their native languages. This interacts with their level of fluency in the second language

Notation: L1 = native language L2 = second language Interesting research questions Can one language ever be fully turned off? Is L1 grammar always active? Can L2 become the more dominant language? What factors influence the relative activation of the two languages (individual and contextual)? Are concepts shared by the bilingual’s two languages? Is there an easy answer? Fully versus partially shared semantics Some questions

Simultaneous bilingualism Rate of development Whether languages are related or not doesn’t seem to matter Vocabulary growth of bilinguals is similar to that of monolinguals Some studies suggest that there is some delay in syntactic development Gathercole (2002) Lag acquiring count/mass N distinction (rice/pea) Lag acquiring grammatical gender

Interesting effects in bilinguals Interference Code switching

Interference Does knowing two languages lead to interference? When found, interference is at multiple levels Phonological - least amount of interference Lexical - mixing words from different languages Initially, appear to use a one word per thing strategy But as they realize there that they’re speaking two language, then they’ll use words from both languages simultaneously Syntactic Until year two, may use only one syntactic system which is common to both languages Then a brief period with two sets of lexical items, but still a common syntax Finally, two lexicons and two sets of syntax Interesting effects in bilinguals

Code switching When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one language with a phrase or word from another language “I want a motorcycle VERDE” Switching is systematic

When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one language with a phrase or word from another language “I want a motorcycle VERDE” Code switching The Spanish adjective “verde” follows a grammatical rule that is observed by most bilingual speakers that code-switch “I want a VERDE motorcycle” Would be incorrect because language switching can occur only if the adjective is placed according to the rules of the language of the adjective In this case, the adjective is in Spanish; therefore, the adjective must follow the Spanish grammatical rule that states that the noun must precede the adjective

Traditionally viewed (semi-lingualism) as a strategy to compensate for diminished language proficiency. Bilinguals code-switch because they do not know either language completely Problem: Focus typically on written/reading rather than spoken performance Early researchers viewed code-switching as evidence that the bilinguals’ two languages were organized in separate and distinct mental dictionaries. Code switching

Generally, bilinguals take longer to read and comprehend sentences containing code-switched words This is due to a “mental switch mechanism” that determines which of the bilingual’s two mental dictionaries are “on” or “off” during language comprehension. This mental switch is responsible for selecting the appropriate mental dictionary to be employed during the comprehension of a sentence. E.g., if reading an English, a Spanish code-switched word is encountered, the mental switch must disable the English linguistic system, and enable the Spanish linguistic system. Code switching

This time difference depends on similarity of the languages Chinese-English bilinguals take longer to recognize English code- switched words in Chinese sentences only if the English words contain initial consonant-consonant (e.g., flight) clusters, simply because the Chinese language lacks this phonotactic structure. Another current view suggests that language dominance (i.e., which language is used more frequently) plays an important role in code- switching Code switching

Caramazza and Brones (1980) Task: Spanish-English bilinguals decide whether a presented word (e.g., gun) was a member of a more general category (e.g., weapon) Restults: it turned out not to matter whether language of the presented word matched or mismatched the language of the presented category name This suggests a general representation of the concept is being activated; such activation facilitates the form of the concept in either language Bilingual Representations

Kirsner and colleagues Priming in lexical decision was not as strong when cross-language equivalents were used as primes, relative to when a word was repeated in the same language There should be no difference if both words lead to the activation of one general (language non-specific) representation Bilingual Representations

Models of the bilingual lexicons L1=First Language L2=Second Language Potter et al (1984) L1L2 IMAGES CONCEPTS Word Association Model L1L2 IMAGES CONCEPTS Concept Mediation Model

A hybrid view if words are concrete, high in frequency, or are cross-linguistic cognates of one another, they tend to be accessed via a common representation if words are abstract, low in frequency, or non-cognates, they tend to be accessed via separate representations for each language Bilingual Representations

L1 L2 concepts lexical links conceptual links conceptual links Kroll & Stewart (1994) Revised Hierarchical Model

Distributed Feature Model level Abstract Words L1 L2 L1 lexical level conceptual Concrete Words L2 L1 = First Language L2 = Second Language DeGroot (1992)