Psychology 2134A/B Chapter 9: Bilingualism

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Sarah Smits- Bandstra

Document Summary

Monolingual: able to speak only one language. Bilingual: able to speak two or more languages. Balance bilingual: a person who grows up speaking two languages and can communicate equally well in either language. Mutual intelligibility: the degree to which speakers of two different languages or dialects can understand each other. The speakers can understand each other, even though there are obvious differences between them. Language a speakers can understand language b speakers, but b can"t understand a. Swedish people can"t understand danish, but danish people can understand swedish. This could largely be because of social bias. Heritage language: the language spoken in an immigrant"s country of origin. These speakers don"t often become fully fluent in their new country"s language, but their children will be bilingual. Their children"s children are more likely to be monolingual with the new country"s language. Incomplete first language acquisition: the failure to attain full native speaker proficiency of the first language.