PSYC3331 Lecture 18: PSYC3311 Lecture 18: Lecture 18 and 19
A bilingual is someone who speaks two languages (multilingual speaks more than two). However,
categorisation as bilingual is not clear cut because it is hard to say how well someone needs to speak a
second language to be considered bilingual. A person might formally learn a language at school, and
even get good marks in it, but how well do they have to speak it for it to be considered their second
language?
Moreover, there are an increasing number of people born to non
-
native speakers of a language who
grow up in that language environment and can understand their parent's language, but can’t speak it.
Should they be considered bilingual?
Simultaneous
bilinguals who learnt their two languages at about the same time in childhood.
These are children who are exposed to two different languages in the home, maybe because the
parents speak different languages, or because there is a nanny who speaks a different language to
the parents.
1.
Early sequential
bilinguals who were monolingual for a while, but were then immersed in a
second language during their childhood (a bit vague as to how long the delay needs to be before
someone is considered sequential rather than simultaneous). NB: The two languages are referred
to as L1 and L2, with regard to the chronological order of their being learnt and regardless of their
relative dominance of use.
2.
Late sequential
bilinguals who learnt their L2 after childhood.
3.
Putting that aside, there are three categories of bilingualism:
It is known that later leaning of L2 generally leads to poorer proficiency than earlier learning, but there is
said to be a
critical period
after which native
-
like performance in L2 cannot be achieved. There is a
disagreement, however, as to what that critical period is. The focus is usually on pronunciation (i.e.,
whether the person has a foreign accent or not) but syntax and vocabulary have also been examined.
An influential study of bilingual grammatical ability by Johnson and Newport (1989) suggested the
critical period ends at about age 15. For pronunciation, it is usually agreed that puberty is the end point
(originally Lenneberg, 1967). However, even many who learn their L2 prior to puberty have evidence of
a foreign accent, though less so the earlier the Age of Acquisition (AoA) or LS (Flege, 2005).
Even if an early sequential bilingual has little or no apparent foreign accent in L2 (and L2 has become
their dominant language) it can be shown that they might still have some deficiencies in phonological
processing, depending to some extent on the nature of their L1:
Nguyen
-
Hoan and Taft (2010) found interesting results with Cantonese/English bilinguals who arrived in
Australia before the age of 6. Cantonese is a morphosyllabic language where there is no need to analyse
a word below the level of the syllable, and this presumably explains why such bilinguals were found to
be less sensitive to the phonemic structure of English nonwords than were monolinguals or bilinguals
from a non
-
morphosyllabic background (shown in a phoneme deletion task). Concomitant with this lack
of sensitivity, the Cantonese/English bilinguals had poorer comprehension of spoken passages which
included novel proper names. It seems that when they encountered novel spoken words, they had
difficulty processing the information because they were unable to analyse those words into their
phonemic content. Real words were processed perfectly well, presumably because they had been learnt
holistically and did not require sublexical access.
Speech Production
Bilingualism
Monday, 18 June 2018 6:12 PM
Lecture 18 and 19 Page 1
Document Summary
A bilingual is someone who speaks two languages (multilingual speaks more than two). However, categorisation as bilingual is not clear cut because it is hard to say how well someone needs to speak a second language to be considered bilingual. Moreover, there are an increasing number of people born to non-native speakers of a language who grow up in that language environment and can understand their parent"s language, but can t speak it. Putting that aside, there are three categories of bilingualism: Simultaneous bilinguals who learnt their two languages at about the same time in childhood. These are children who are exposed to two different languages in the home, maybe because the parents speak different languages, or because there is a nanny who speaks a different language to the parents. Nb: the two languages are referred to as l1 and l2, with regard to the chronological order of their being learnt and regardless of their relative dominance of use.
