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ACQUISITION
If a speaker is fluent in two languages, then they
are said to be bilingual.
A bilingual person is someone brought up in a
culture where they are exposed to two languages
from birth.
It is not necessary for them to be equally fluent in
both languages, but at least they should be very
competent in the second one.
Weinreich (1953) proposed Categories of
bilingualism
Simultaneous bilingualism:
L1 and 12 learned at the same time.
Early sequential bilingualism;
L1 learned first, but L2 learned relatively early in
childhood.
Late bilingualism:
L2 learned later, in adolescence or after.
One of the first detailed studies of bilingualism was
the diary study of Leopold (19391949).
Leopold was a German linguist, whose daughter
Hildegard had an American mother and lived from an
early age in the USA. German was used in the home
at first, but this soon gave way to English, the
environment language.
The diary showed that young children can quickly
(within 6 months) forget the old language and pick
up a new one if they move to another country.
Code switching (also called language switching)
is the name given to the tendency of bilinguals
when speaking to other bilinguals to switch from
one language to another, often to more
appropriate words or phrases.
This process is highly variable between
individuals.
Although some researchers have argued that there
is no obvious processing cost attached to being
bilingual (e.g. see Nishimura, 1986), others have
found indications of interference between L1 and L2
(see B. Harley & Wang, 1997, for a review).
For example, increasing proficiency in L2 by
immigrant children is associated with reduced speed
of access to L1 (Magiste, 1986). Harley and Wang
(1997)
What happens if a child has already become
moderately proficient in L1 when they start
learning L2?
Although the duration of exposure to L2 (which is
often the length of residence in the new country)
is important, other factors are also vital.
These include the personality and cognitive
attributes of the person learning L2 (Cummins,
1991).
L1 is extremely important: the development of L1 and L2
is interdependent. Children who have attained a high level
of skill at L1 are also likely to do so at L2, particularly on
relatively academic measures of language performance.
It appears that bilingual children suffer no obvious
linguistic disadvantages from learning two languages
simultaneously (Snow, 1993).
There might be some initial delay in learning vocabulary
items in one language, but this delay is soon made up, and
of course the total bilingual vocabulary of the children is
much greater.
The bilingual lexicon: How do we translate
between languages?
Is there a separate store for each language, or just one common store?
In separate-store models, there are separate lexicons for each language.
These are connected at the semantic level (Potter, So, von Eckardt, &
Feldman, 1984). Evidence for the separate-stores model comes from the
finding that the amount of facilitation gained by repeating a word (a
technique called repetition priming) is much greater and longer-lasting
within than between languages (Kirsner et al., 1984), although repetition
priming might not be tapping semantic processes (Scarborough, Gerard, &
Cortese, 1984).