PSY274H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Language Ideology, Language Contact, Code-Switching
Document Summary
Bilingual communities exist throughout the world, wherever members of different ethnic groups meet, interact, and exchange ideas. Contact between speakers of different languages have diverse linguistic and societal consequences. Exposure to different languages may lead bilingual speakers gradually to incorporate new linguistic material into their primary languages. Bilingualism confers some advantages to learning beyond the knowledge of language itself. Bilingual infants were more adaptable in their cognitive processing and were unable to learn to redirect their gaze. Because a bilingual"s two languages are both active when speaking or listening to either one, they need to rely on cognitive executive functions to keep their two lanagues separate and to prevent interference. Advantages accruing to bilinguals increased with age (also exhibit a slower rate of loss) Languages change as a result of influences from other linguistic systems. French influence on english grammar occurs in some comparative and superlative adjectival constructions: old english employed the suffixes er and est s in fair/fairer/fairest.