Showing posts with label Bilingualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bilingualism. Show all posts

Friday, February 12, 2016

A bilingualism research question

We know children learn languages very easily, and do it 'perfectly'. An adult tries to learn a language for years and most of the time, fail miserably or only partially succeed. Why do children learn so well?

Brain plasticity is cited as a reason, in relation to Critical Period Hypothesis of Lenneberg. Research has proved that delayed development of pre-frontal cortex in infants result in a delay in cognitive control. Delay in cognitive control results in facilitation of convention learning. After all, language is a set of conventions!

So, it is like saying that children learn languages easily because they lack cognitive control. Now, that is very interesting. If lack of cognitive control facilitates acquiring conventions, why do we make a lot of rules about languages and try to learn these rules instead of the language as such? Aren't we doing it the unnatural way? Instead of doing away with cognitive control, we use cognitive control excessively in order to learn languages.

To learn a language, what we need to do is very simple- lose our cognitive control. That is all we need to do.

How do we lose our cognitive control and become childlike so that we learn faster and save a few years of our lives? This is the research question in Bilingualism or Multilingualism.


Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Acquisition in Bilingualism

How is language acquired in case of bilingualism. Sometimes a learner is exposed to two languages simultaneously, sometimes one language comes earlier than the other. It is observed that language development happens at different rates in different learners in case of bilingualism. We look at the issue from the perspective of Phonology in this essay.

Issues in Phonology
It is observed that bilingual learners have a problem in picking up accent of the second language. Learning a second language is problematic for a bilingual just as for everyone else. This is because one language already has a dominance in the learner's system. Even if bilingualism is simultaneous, that is, both the languages are given at the same time in early infancy, one of the languages become the dominant language. If this doesn't happen, the child will be confused about the codes of language. This can result in latent language development in children. The gist is, that one language has to be the dominant language.

How does the proficiency of the second language get affected by various factors like time of exposure, age of exposure, etc.?  It is observed that children exposed to a second at the earliest age acquire the language better. The earlier the better. Second factor is exposure. The more the exposure, the better the rate of acquiring the second language. Here, exposure includes both reception and production of language. This is related to brain plasticity. Brain plasticity is explained in two ways. The first is about evolution: as human race advances through centuries in time, the brain becomes more adaptive and more capable of handling more complex data. Thus today's human brain might be a raw material for what might come a century or two later. The second way brain plasticity can be looked at is at a micro level: an individual's brain changes over time, and becomes more adaptive and complex with exposure. In the case of bilingual, this plasticity of brain is lost as age advances. So, if the child is exposed to a second language at a very early age, the child would pick up that language in a better fashion.

Becoming a Bilingual
In order to be called a bilingual, one should be able to handle two languages. This involves various levels of language. The very first is the sound system of a language, because phonemes are the basic building blocks of a language. A bilingual child should be able to distinguish between the sound systems of the two languages.

Experiments have proved that new born babies can differentiate between some pairs of languages that share a common sound system, but have sufficient differences in their rhythmic pattern/structure and prosody. (Prosody is the way you say things / the emotional signature on utterances.) So, of languages have same prosody, children cannot distinguish between languages. This implies that in the very early stages of language development, children develop prosody and rhythmic features. That is, children differentiate between speech sounds and non-speech sounds. At such early age, prosodic bootstrapping happens in children. This is why the age of exposure is said to be very important. Prosody gives children the basic data that is used for the rest of their lives.

After bootstrapping happens, the child starts picking up recursive parameters with which it can generate new structures using the available bits of language. That is, children distinguish between speech sounds and non-speech sounds and then, start differentiating between sounds of different languages. So, already a system is built up as the default system. If infants are exposed to two languages, prosody helps separating and building up two separate systems. This is because, once a child is first exposed to its first language, it acts as a reference point for later language acquisition. Infants exposed to Spanish and Catalan were able to distinguish between these languages at an early age of 4.5 months! 5 month olds can distinguish between two languages which are within the same native rhythmic class. For example, American and Australian English can be distinguished between by babies. But they cannot differentiate between Dutch and German (Dutch is a stress based language, while German is not). All this can be related to the idea that a child learns languages with reference to its first language.

Segmental Information
After picking up the phonemes in the language, children go on to acquire other features of language. Vowels are next in line. How are vowels distinguished by children? There are experiment based evidences that say that 4.5-6 month old babies can distinguish between mother tongue and a second language. Usually bilingual kids get confused regarding two language inputs that they receive. But if there are cues like prosody available for the child, this is overcome by the child. Even here, for different pairs of languages, the mental processes will be different.

In syllable detection tasks, french speakers were found to distinguish /ba/ in the given words because they were familiar to them in their first language. But when they were asked to identify /bal/ it took time/found it difficult because their first language doesn't process syllables that way. This is evidence to different parsing techniques used by different individuals.
Another test using time-compressed language: Anyone can adapt to time-compressed language. But if you remove the features of language that determine boundary features, like the space between words, etc., it becomes difficult. When such language bits were given to learners, it was found that they were able to transfer adaptation to the second languages that were in the same rhythmic group, and they found it difficult to transfer adaptation to languages that were not within their rhythmic group. Between Spanish and Catalan, learners could transfer their adaptation, but between English and French, they couldn't.

Phonemes
6 month old infants can identify native language phonemes. This is a developmental change. First the child learns to distinguish between speech and non-speech sounds, then it moves to identifying phonemes of its native language, and differentiates them from those of other languages.
There is a decline in sensitivity to non-native phonemes as the child grows up. That is, language specific system builds up in early childhood. After a few months of age, children can't distinguish between different phonemes (10-12 months). This is a complex task that the brain does by fixing one system as the dominant system.
Perceptual re-organization: sensitivity to consonants also decline by the end of the first year of a child's life. English speaking children distinguished between English and Zulu clicks (consonants). This did not depend on exposure since these subject did not have exposure to Zulu. So, by the end of first year of its life, a child already knows that its primary language is different from other languages.

EEG done on learners gives mismatch negativity. Mismatch negativity is obtained when a difference is identified by the subject. for example, /b/, /b/, /b/, /b/, /d/ should generate a mismatch negativity since the last phoneme is different from the previous ones. In Learners' EEG, mismatch graph amplitude increased showing discrimination of sounds between two languages when exposed.

Monolingual children have to handle only one language data. In bilingualism, children have double task. All the processes discussed above happen doubly for a bilingual child. It has to identify and distinguish between two sets of phonemes simultaneously. As children grow, they can't distinguish between all the sounds from other languages if they are similar. Bilinguals distinguish between similar sounds a much later stage than monolinguals (probably because they have to handle much more data).

Notes from : Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches Edited by Judith F Kroll and Annette MB De Groot 

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Bilingualism and Multilingualism: Some Central Concepts

Bilingualism and multiligualism exist and influence a host of social, cultural, political and psychological issues surrounding us. It is a widespread phenomena. When driven by necessity it usually doesn't go beyond a basic level of proficiency necessary for functional purposes. 

In order to be called multilingual or bilingual, one needs to know 

Competence in more than one language can be approached from social as well as individual perspectives. A nation may be full of multilingual people, but may not officially recognize all of them. A country may be officially bilingual or multilingual and yet most of its citizens may fall into the monolingual basket. While both individual and social aspects are important, both are treated and studied differently. Individual bilingualism should be studied linguistically and psycholinguistically while the social version is more historical, political, educational, etc. in dimension. 

Social bilingualism is certainly of the longstanding type. Individual type is less permanent (Immigrants to USA: first generation monolinguals-second generation bilinguals-third generation monolinguals). When different languages are used in different functions and domains, the situation is referred to as diglossia (English and French in England after Norman conquest). There are various individual and social factors at play in the background when nation is being declared monolingual or bilingual. 

People move across the world on various pretexts. Languages get mixed in the process. Trade, military action, political intervention/union, war, etc. are a few instances. For example, when colonial powers entered colonies, they somehow made their language a necessity in the colonies, and to date most colonies continue using the foreign language. Multilingualism is observed in border areas also. Cultural and educational motivation also can be the reason. 

Classification
Every language situation is unique. But some of the elements that influence the formation of bilingual or multilingual situations are recurring. Thus there could be a framework to study this phenomenon. 

John Edwards has created a typological framework of language–contact settings, with particular reference to minority linguistic groups. The framework begins with the adaptation of a geographical scheme. It has three basic distinctions. 

1. Minority Languages

  • those which are unique to one state- unique (e.g., Breton in France), 
  • those which are non-unique but which are still subordinate in all contexts in which they occur- non-unique (e.g., Basque in Spain and France), and 
  • those which are minorities in one setting but majority varieties elsewhere- local-only (French in Canada and French in France)
2. the type of connection among speakers of the same language in different states; are they adjoining (again, Basque in Spain and France) or non-adjoining (French in Canada and French in France)? 
3.  what degree of spatial cohesion exists among speakers within a given state? Cohesive (Cree in Canada) and non-cohesive (Spanish in the United States) 


The Reality of Multilingualism
‘Link languages’ fall into three categories: 

  1. socalled ‘languages of wider communication,’ varieties that have achieved regional or global power- Languages become those of wider communication not because of their intrinsic qualities, but because of the power and prestige of their speakers. Example: Greek, Latin.
  2. pidgins (a simplified language or simplified mixture of languages used by non-native speakers), creoles (a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin becoming nativized by children as their first language, with the accompanying effect of a fully developed vocabulary and system of grammar), and other restricted linguistic forms whose diminished scope is at once easy to master and sufficient for communicative purposes which are, themselves, quite circumscribed; and 
  3. constructed or ‘artificial’ languages (example:  Ludwig Zamenhof’s Esperanto). 

The other great bridging method is translation. The problem with translation is the elements involved in making the translation. Perfect translation happens only in imagination! 


Personal Fluencies
Some views acknowledged bilingualism only where two well-developed and roughly equal fluencies were found. Others have suggested that linguistic repertoire expansion begins with the ability to produce complete and meaningful  utterances in a second language. Any attempt to come to grips with bilingual competences must obviously start from definable levels or degrees. There are many elements of a language that can be measured. Proficiency in one doesn't guarantee the same in another. 

Many tests have been used to measure bilingualism, including rating scales and tests of fluency, flexibility, and dominance. Factors such as attitude, age, gender, intelligence, memory, inter-linguistic distance, and context of testing are all potentially confounding. Even if you can measure accurately, there would remain problems of adequate labeling (balanced bilinguals, ambilinguals, and equilinguals?). 

Receptive (or passive) and Productive (or active) Bilingualism: the difference here is between those who understand a language – either spoken or written – but cannot produce it themselves, and those who can do both. 
Additive or subtractive tendencies: does learning a new language represent a repertoire expansion or a replacement of the earlier variety? Outcomes here tend to reflect different social pressures and needs. Additive bilingualism generally occurs where both languages continue to be useful and valued; the subtractive variety typically reflects a setting in which one language is more dominant, where one is on the ascendant and the other is waning.
Primary and secondary bilingualism, between a dual competence acquired naturally through contextual demands, and one where systematic and formal instruction has occurred.
‘élite’ and ‘folk’ bilingualism: The former has typically involved two (or more) prestigious languages, and often had as much to do with social-status marking as it did with a thirst for knowledge and cultural boundary crossing. 

The Bilingual or Multilingual Individual
Individuals who are bilingual or multilingual are from all sorts of backgrounds. With sufficient opportunity and motivation, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent can become bilingual. 

Can bilingualism increase the scope of intelligence? Today's scholars say otherwise. Florence Goodenough –an important educational psychologist who worked with Lewis Terman, the developer of the Stanford–Binet intelligence test – actually wrote that ‘the use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation’!

There are some important difficulties involved in attempting to show a relationship – positive or negative – between bilingualism and cognitive development, mental flexibility, and intelligence. 
The most obvious bilingual benefit is of course language choice, but it is also common to find linguistic alteration occurring within one segment of speech. Transfer and code-switching are available. Lexcal transfer, transfer involving translation, morphological transfer, syntactic transfer, and phonological tranfer are varieties. Some of these might represent aspects of borrowing.

Theory and Practice
There are advantages of an early-acquired bilingual competence; these tend to reflect, above all, the relative ease of early learning and the higher levels of fluency and vocabulary that often result. This argument about plasticity of brain led to overemphasis on early acquisition. If there is sufficient motivation, older learners also can be good learners.  If we could combine the maturity and articulated necessity of the older with the impressionability, imitativeness, spontaneity, and unselfconsciousness of the younger, we would surely have a recipe for rapid and proficient bilingual acquisition.

The attention on memory based language learning has shifted to conversation/practice based learning. Immersion classrooms provide the most recent and most important embodiment of this principle. In this context many useful theories have emerged.

Most such approached depart from behaviourism and rely upon cognitive conception and go for rule formulation and testing. Learning happens through stages of InterLanguages. Social psychology based theories have looked at motivational features. When the social aspects of language are considered, the force of the situation, and the attitudes it provokes in potential learners, are central. Gardner has consistently attempted to link the social context, and the cultural beliefs within it, to individual learner capacities – including, of course, motivational levels – and the formal/informal settings in which the language is to be learned. Throughout, he stresses the influence of integrative motivation upon positive outcomes. 

Clément’s model sees individual motivations more influential in the social setting. He assigns particular relevance for those language learners who are also minority-group members, and whose first language is threatened by the forces of those speaking the second. 

Giles considers language learning as an intergroup process, with more attention given to assimilative tendencies and apprehensions, to the preservation of ethnic group boundaries and identities. 

Spolsky’s ‘general theory’ (1989) attempts  to bring together all aspects of language learning, and assumes learning to be an interactive and socially contextualized process. 

As theories advanced, we can see a clear emphasis on social and motivational aspects of learning. Most theories discard the assumption that some 'peoples' have no head for languages. They stress the importance of the setting, desires, needs, attitudes and motivation of ordinary people. The fact that millions of people become bilinguals just because of necessity puts all other factors on the backseat. 

Language and Identity
Language is a vehicle of tradition and culture, is a  medium of group narrative, and defines one's identity. When more than one language is involved, its implications should be considered carefully. The important factor here is the degree of bilingualism. Studies on personality and identity is difficult because of the lack of sufficient data being collected. 

Some have the opinion that bilinguals have 'two' identities/personalities. Language choice has bearings on personality.

Each of us may carry the tribal markings of many groups, that our ‘group identity’ is itself a mosaic rather than a monolith. Still, it is clear that, where language issues are central, the pivotal group is the ethnocultural community: overlaps of importance may occur because of simultaneous membership in gender, socioeconomic, educational, occupational, and many other categories, but the base here is an ethnic one.

How does a bilingual feel about her identity then? Does it lead to the borders of psychological duality? The deeper the linguistic and cultural burrowing into another community the greater the impact upon identity. In case of some bilinguals there is a primary allegiance to one identity. But for some who became bilinguals at a very early age, it is difficult to find such allegiance to one identity. 

The influence of language on identity can be clearly seen in the association of language with nationality. Languages in contact can also build walls to protect language identity. An interesting form of this defensive strategy is linguistic prescriptivism or purism which, given free rein, would often lead to proscription. Concern about the ‘contamination’ of one language by another, about infiltration and borrowing and about the bullying of small languages by larger ones is an historically longstanding worry; the desire to keep one’s language ‘pure’ has been strong, at least since the time of the decline of Latin in Europe, the rise of standardized vernaculars, the development of printing, and the growth of literacy. 

The importance of being multilingual is, above all, social and psychological rather than linguistic. Beyond types, categories, methods, and processes is the essential animating tension of identity.


Summary of Chapter 1 of-
Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie. Edited. (2013) The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  

Friday, January 08, 2016

Why does politics always use Language as a unifying factor?

"The phenomenon of linguistic imperialism and its attendant forms of socio-political exclusion is not about oppressive relations based on race or skin colour that prevailed earlier. It is about unequal power relations whereby dominated groups regardless of skin colour or nationality are coerced into complying with forces of domination and mental control. In other words, the ultimate goal of linguistic imperialism is to ensure that the dominated identify with the cultural norms of the dominator, and accept the hegemonic language." (Ndhlovu, 181)

This quote about Zimbabwe reveals a lot about the politics of language. At a more parochial level, all of us experience some sort of politics of language in our day to day language. If you are from a monolinguistic state it would identify itself on the basis of language. If it is a multilingual state, it would have its preferences towards certain languages. It will surely employ various techniques to address plurality of languages. 

Politics uses language because language synchronizes the experiences of speakers. Our experience of the world is mapped on to something. This something is called language. If world view is taken as a criterion, then no two language provides same worldview. That is why every language group has a particular world view. At a personal level, language defines your identity. Also at a social level, language defines your identity. This identity is what politics wants to appropriate. 

Ndhlovu, Finex. The Politics of Language and Nation Building in Zimbabwe

Language and Identity

Language is linked to one's identity. There are two perspectives to it- shallow and deep. The shallow perspective is at the level of identifying people according to the language one speaks. One can be placed within or without a certain language speaking group. One can choose to belong to or identify as part of a language group. At a deeper level, one's identity changes when one speaks a different language. Language is not able to say what you want to say, usually in your L2. L1 being your primary language is always available for meaningful and effective communication. It is found that Russian speakers find it easy to identify shades of blue, because Russian has different names for different shades of blue. The earlier you familiarize yourself with a language, the more comfortable you would be in that language. When we use L2, we become conscious and formal. This can be explained on the basis of ethnocultural elements. People usually associate languages with contexts-social and cultural. For example, Hindi for home communication and English for office communication. English has formality attached to it thus. Therefore, if you are forced to use English at home or Hindi at the office, you would feel uncomfortable. Also, status, degree, etc. are associated to certain languages. When English is given to non-English children at home, they get confused. Children know that English is not their first language. This affects the identity of the child.

Bilingualism

Bilingualism is defined as having the ability to use two or more languages.  
Bilingualism can be individual and collective. When an individual in a society learns a second language he/she becomes a bilingual. There are possibilities and instances where an entire society turns bilingual by learning a second language. By learning another language the status of the learner changes. 

Individual bilingualism: There are cognitive advantages. Bilingual people can do certain tasks better than others. 

Collective Bilingualism: Emigrants change the linguistic composition of a place. For example, in 7th, 8th and 9th centuries, Persian came to India. Through interaction with Hindi, a new language was born- Urdu. When people from another linguistic background reach another place (colonists, religious, etc.) they bring their culture and language along with them. When British came to India, they took over the political system and then taught us English for the sake of administration. In Belgium, Flemish and French are spoken. Flemish, spoken in Flanders resembles Dutch because of the geographical proximity to Netherlands.

Varieties of Bilingualism: 

  1. Minority Languages- spoken in restricted areas (Breton in Brittany, France)
  2. Non-Unique language- Basque in Spain.
  3. Minority in one setting, majority in another: French in Canada, French in France
3 important variables in Bilingualism
  1. Speaker
  2. Language
  3. Setting 
How does Bilingualism begin?
  • To bridge language gap
    If people of two different languages come together, there has to be a link language or a lingua-franca. It becomes a pidgin as it begins to take shape. Later when it becomes the first language of second generation learners, it becomes a creole. There could be artificial languages like Esperanto.
How do we judge someone to be bilingual?
Someone should be able to speak 2 fully developed languages (not dialects of the same language). The person should be able to comprehend and produce both languages with proficiency. There should be comparable proficiency in both languages. Someone who knows only how to greet in a second language is not a bilingual. There are rating scales, questionnaires, fluency tests, etc. to determine these factors. 

Age, gender, intelligence, memory, context of testing, inter-linguistic distance, etc. are important factors that affect bilingualism. 

Terminology used in the study of Bilingualism
  • balanced bilinguals
  • unbalanced bilinguals
  • equilinguals
  • ambilinguals
  • receptive and productive bilinguals
  • additive and subtractive bilinguals
  • primary and secondary bilinguals

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