Bilingualism

Li2 Language Variation
Bilingualism and language contact
Today’s topics
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outcomes of language contact
psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and formal
aspects of bilingualism
why to bring up your children to be bilingual
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Outcomes of language contact
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merger
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influence
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“mixed language”
pidgin/creole
borrowing (words, grammatical structures…)
Sprachbund phenomena
death
bilingualism
Mixed languages
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Also
Alsomany
manygypsy
gypsy
languages,
languages,such
such
as
asLomavren
Lomavren
Kerschbaumerisch
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„zu les Kurse je peux nix te sagen weil je
versteht nicht genau ce qu'ils meint avec leurs
Titel, aber hier est le Herzog und De Meuron
link. http://www.allianz-arena.net”
German lexicon, French grammar
French: articles, auxiliaries, pronouns…
z German: nouns, verb roots, adjectives, word
order…
z gender: Gm neuter → K masculine
z no agr with lexical verbs; default 3sg
z
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Pidgins and Creoles
Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea)
photos from Robert Eklund
Borrowing
An
AnIndian
Indiancrore
croreisisequal
equaltoto
7
100
100lakh
lakhor
or10
10million
million(10
(107).).
Spanglish calque
English
Spanish
Te llamo para atrás
I’ll call you back
¿Cómo puedo ayudarlo?
How can I help you?
¿Qué desea?
Spanglish
English
Spanish
deletear
delete (on computer)
borrar
dragear
drag (on computer)
arrastrar
taipear
type
escribir a máquina
chores
shorts
pantalones cortos
carpeta
carpet
alfombra
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Aspects of bilingualism
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psycholinguistic
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sociolinguistic
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bilingual brain
bilingual acquisition and loss
second language acquisition
political: language engineering, what to teach…
formal linguistic
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structural constraints on code switching
Code Switching
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Spanish-AmE code switching
Hey wizard my negro, i miss you mijo, since the day you
got busted. but anyways i know you got your stupet lil
haina supuestamente modelito, but she’s nothing but a
lil bitch. but anyways puta you know who this is the one
n only la lonely the one that blacky love’s. and you know
that fucken bitch his with you because you cry to him to
be back with you, lil cry baby. but anyways bitch one day
you are going to see us back.
to: EL WIZARD A.K.A BLACKY
from: LA LOVELY,PANORAMA CITY, CALIFORNIA
Angela
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Saian Supa Crew - KLR – 1999
Ou pé pa sav', ki gen mwen aimé
Lé ou ka di mwen ou excité
Ké en mwen ka pèd cadence lé ou ka allongé
Cow aw en lé mwen, jiska demain
Mmew vlé senti po aw satin
Nou cétain nou ké lass' démain matin
Illico j'mets l'turbo, j'adore quand tu m'dis :
"Leeroy, c'est toi l'plus beau, t'es celui qu'j'préfère,
Celui qui m'fait grimper au rideau, à n'importe quelle heure et
Dans n'importe quel studio, tout l'monde sait qu'tu connais
Toutes le ses-po, donc on t'aime trop
On sait tous qu'avec toi, on passera des moments très chaud "
A chaque fois qu'tu t'sens seule, n'hésite pas, compose mon numéro
Toi-même tu sais qu'une fois d'plus, ce sera très chaud.
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Haitian Creole
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…moin pa jam kite li ba ou
so you stuck with me
bouzin. li avek ou paske
ou te gross pou li, min li
pa rinmin ou, se moin li
rinmin…
I'll never let him give you
anything so you stuck with
me whore. He's with you
because you were
pregnant for him once, but
he doesn't love you, it's
me he loves.
Bringing up baby bilingual
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“why not”
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misconceptions → the
current problem
why & how
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case studies and recent
scientific insights
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Why not?
Common parental worries and problems
Common misconceptions
Common parental worries and
problems
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parents only feel comfortable in the language they met in (Ernie)
parents’ pride in knowing English (Noure)
parents wanting their kids to be “normal” (fluent speakers of (only) AmE)
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“immigrant parents, people who do not feel part of society, believe that if their
child speaks Spanish they will either not be able to assimilate easily (difficulty
with learning language/culture), or they will not be allowed to assimilate
easily (actively excluded by others)”
“I think that the only problem with bringing up my brother the way my mother
did it is that it cut him off from many social contacts before he started school
because he could not speak English”
parents seeing E (but not their L1) as valuable socio-economic commodity
working on L2 takes away time child could spend on math, etc.
Henrik (German) and Donna (Chinese) speak English to their child because
they don’t know each other’s language
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Common misconceptions
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exposure to n languages → 1/n proficiency (grammar, accent, literary
knowledge…)
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“if you don't have a really good teacher to teach you, you may not be good at
the second language, because some people in Hong Kong, they just
translate Chinese directly into English, so it's grammatically not correct”
acquisition delay can lead to social problems
children will conflate/confuse the two languages
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“You get things mixed up sometimes because I feel like I don't have a grasp of
one language fully, it's always halfway in between of each language”
"My parents are Nigerian and they speak Igbo, but they wouldn't teach me
because they thought I'd be confused"
very few attested cases (Kerschbäumerisch, Lomavren…)
stigmatisation
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“In Texas…there's a very large Spanish-speaking community…and because it's
so large, it's very severely discriminated against…People hear you speaking
Spanish…, they might discriminate against you.” [see smoking cessation]
Actual problems
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blocking of acquisition of L2 contrasts
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Best et al 1988, Pallier et al 1997
vocabulary
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smaller? (Dutch-Turkish study)
slower?
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slower picture naming in German and Swedish by young
German immigrants vs native Swedish children in
Sweden (Mägiste 1979)
Possible reasons:
ƒ
ƒ
More words activated in bilinguals
Frequency effect from bilinguals using each language less
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Smoking cessation counseling
90
Percent of current smokers
counseled by a physician to quit
80
79
82
78
68
70
67
58
60
50
39
40
30
20
Sp anis
ea h
ke
r
His
pa
nic
Sp
ea
ke
r
Af
Am rica
er n
ica
n
His
pa
nic
W
hit
e
To
tal
0
As
Am ian
e ri
ca
n
His
p
En
an
Sp glish ic
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Source: Commonwealth Fund 2001 Health Care Quality Survey
Not actually so bad…
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Sometimes ‘confusion’ results from acquisition
problems indepent of bilingualism
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child learning English and French simultaneously avoided words
containing fricatives in one language by using the word from the
other language, e.g. couteau for knife (Celce-Murcia 1977)
word relatedness judgements not affected by activation
of L1 (Thierry and Wu 2007)
picture naming facilitated by visually presented L2
translation equivalent (e.g. DOG:perro; Costa and
Caramazza 1999)
word recognition in early fluent bilinguals is equivalent for
L1 and L2 (Kotz 2001)
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Conclusions wrt “why not”
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confusion
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goes away
can be circumvented via compartmentalisation
children are extremely good at distinguishing languages and keeping
them separate (Rodriguez-Fornells et al 2002); this “language switch”
may be in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Hernandez et al 2001)
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Pettitto et al 2001
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capacity to differentiate two languages is in place prior to first words
competition
Though the other language is activated under certain conditions, this
generally does not affect performance and in some cases enhances it.
deficiency
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In vocabulary is far outweighed by the following advantages…
Why?
scientific and non-scientific reasons
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Benefits of bilingualism
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Non-scientific reasons
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greater range of expression
access to more than one culture
employability
Scientific reasons
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increase in density of grey matter (Mechelli et al 2004)
bilingual kids better at focusing attention and avoiding distractions (tower game)
bilinguals better at filtering out distractions and switching between tasks
(Diamond 2002)
bilinguals learn to read faster, because they recognise symbolic relationships
between letters and sounds earlier (Bialystok 1997)
Bilinguals show superior executive processing
anti-aging
increased chance of maintaining lg after aphasia (for late/non-fluent bilinguals)
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Post-stroke patient understood 2 languages but could speak only one (Potzl 1983)
Bilingual candidates for neurosurgery were found to have areas where cortical
stimulation could interrupt naming in L1, L2, or both (Ojemann and Whitaker 1978)
How?
Pitfalls
Strategies
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Pitfalls
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Start of school syndrome
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children start school, realise their peers speak a
different language, come home and refuse to
speak anything but that language
Sticking to home language eventually overcomes
this
Non-oldest child syndrome
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Some ways of dealing with this…
Strategies
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one parent, one language
one language at home, one outside
both parents speak both languages
nanny (source), peers (linguistic capital)
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schooling in L2 (less desirable in some ways)
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Samantha and nanny vs hispanophone friend
immersion
Saturday school
conventional language classes
compartmentalisation (Beirut dog language)
rich context (Döpke 1992)
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many speakers → better learning of category (Logan et al 1991)
early interaction with live speakers
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Social interaction
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Kuhl et al 2003
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early in life, infants are capable of discerning differences
among the phonetic units of all languages, including nativeand foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and 12 mo of age,
the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic units
sharply declines.
Can this decline in foreign-language phonetic perception be
reversed?
Conclusion:
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Between 9 and 10 months of age, infants show phonetic
learning from live, but not prerecorded, exposure to a foreign
language, suggesting a learning process that does not
require long-term listening and is enhanced by social
interaction.
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Critical age I: grammar
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L1 Chinese, L1 Korean / L2 English
46 participants
Age of Arrival: 3-39
Minimum residence in the US: 5 years
Grammaticality Judgement Test for a range of grammatical properties
Critical age II: accent
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Yeni-Komshian et al. 2000
study of native Korean speakers who came to
US and learned English
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pronunciation of English:
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pronunciation of Korean:
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arrived 1-5: native-like
6-23: accented
1-7: accented
12-23: native-like
E vs. K:
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1-9 E better than K; 12-23 K better than E
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Conclusions
Grey matter
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Mechelli, Andrea, Jenny Crinion, Uta Noppeney,
John O'Doherty, John Ashburner, Richard
Frackowiak, and Cathy Price. 2004.
Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the
bilingual brain. Nature 431:757.
a, Sagittal (x = -45), coronal (y = -59) and axial
(z = 48) view of the left inferior parietal region,
which has increased grey-matter density in
bilinguals relative to monolinguals. b, Greymatter density, measured as cubic millimetres of
grey matter per voxel in the left inferior parietal
region, as a function of second-language
proficiency. Second-language proficiency was
estimated for each subject from a battery of
standardized neuropsychological tests, using
principal component analysis (for details, see
supplementary information). c, Grey-matter
density, measured as for b, as a function of age
at acquisition.
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Acquisition of L2 contrasts
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Pallier et al 1997
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Catalan /e/:/ε/; Spanish only /e/
Catalan-Spanish bilinguals
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Sp = 20 bilinguals with Spanishspeaking parents
Cat = 20 bilinguals with Catalanspeaking parents
After exposure to Spanish leads to
the formation of one [e] category, it
appears to be difficult for the brain
to learn two new phonetic
categories which overlap with this
one (see also Best et al. 1988)
Smaller vocabulary?
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in a 1992 study of 11-year-old Turkish children,
Anneli Schaufeli found that children who were
bilingual in Turkish and Dutch fared significantly
worse on vocabulary tests than children of similar
socio-economic background who spoke only
Turkish.
The bilingual children got an average of 44% of the
test items correct, whereas the monolingual
children on average were correct 75% of the time.
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The Tower Game
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Bialystok 2002
two towers, one made of (smaller) legos and
one of (bigger) duplos
each block holds one family
which tower holds more families? (7-lego vs
4-duplo)
monolinguals master by 5; bilinguals by 4
Thierry and Wu 2007
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Chinese–English bilinguals were required to decide
whether English words presented in pairs were related
in meaning or not
they were unaware of the fact that half of the words
concealed a character repetition when translated into
Chinese.
Whereas the hidden factor failed to affect behavioral
performance, it significantly modulated brain potentials
in the expected direction, establishing that English
words were automatically and unconsciously
translated into Chinese
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Executive processing
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The Simon Effect
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Instruction: if red, press the L key; if green, press the R key
Congruent trial: stimulus appears on the same display side
as the correct response key
Incongruent trial: the position conflicts with the correct
response
incongruent trials trigger 20-30 ms longer response time
Bilingual advantages in the Simon task have been
reported for children (Martin & Bialystok, 2003), young
adults (Bialystok, 2006), and middle-aged and older
adults (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004).
Anti-aging
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For cognitive tasks, the increase in response time
for subjects > 60 years old is more severe for
monolinguals than for bilinguals (Bialystok et al.
2004, 2006).
Bilingualism boosts cognitive performance in
adults and slows the rate of decline in these
processes with age.
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