Bilingualism Flashcards
Simultaneous bilingualism
Heard two languages from birth and acquires them simultaneously
Sequential bilingualism
Hears and begins acquiring one language at birth and then later is
exposed to another
Learn Spanish at home and the English at school
The fusion hypothesis
Children initially create one system that combines all languages heard
The differentiation with autonomous development hypothesis
Children distinguish the languages and they do not affect one another
The differentiation with interdependent development hypothesis
Children distinguish the languages but they affect one another
How is this knowledge of multiple languages represented in the brain?
3 theories by Meisel
The fusion hypothesis
The differentiation with autonomous development hypothesis
The differentiation with interdependent development hypothesis
How is this knowledge of multiple languages represented in the brain?
Volterra and Taeschner
Children start off with one system
The subsequently distinguish the vocabularies but use a single grammar
Around 3 years of age the children form two distinct systems
Work has since suggested earlier differentiation
Is bilingual children’s sound perception tuned to both languages simultaneously?
Perception of sound difference that exists in Catalan but not Spanish
Monolingual learners of both Spanish and Catalan could perceive the distinction at 4 months
At 8 months and 12 months only Catalan learners could perceive
the difference
Bilingual children could perceive the difference at 4 and 12 months but not at 8 months
Do children vary babbling according to context?
Unclear
10-14 month olds in bilingual Montreal families did not babble differently in English and French contexts
There is a case of one child who babbled differently depending on which parent (each parent spoke a different language)
Bilingual word learning and mutual exclusivity
Have two words for a given object
So what happens?
Would know the English word for some thing and the Spanish word for others
Would learn the wrong word for objects - already know the word for shoe, so zapato will get assigned to something other than a shoe - misassigning words
So how does this work?
Different languages are often learned in different contexts, so are the vocabularies separate?
8-30 month olds - about 30% of their vocabulary existed in both languages - translational equivalents
Are children aware of different languages as different systems and so override the mutual exclusivity?
Bilinguals less likely to display mutual exclusivity
Trilinguals don’t seem to use is at all
What does this mean for theories of ‣ language learning and mutual exclusivity?
Strong case for learned rather than innate
Bilingualism and Theory of Mind
Many people a bilingual child encounters do not understand the language they know
Requires taking someone else’s perspective
Need to reason about different people - one contains knowledge of English, another contains knowledge of Spanish
Monolingual kids have a hard time understanding that not everyone speaks their language - there is a thing called Spanish and only some people understand it
If context-dependent, could be just another rule rather than a theory of mind (these are common in other areas of kids’ lives)
Code Switching
Deliberate switching from one language to another in the middle of a discourse or sentence
Typically requires theory of mind
Mixing
and 2 reasons it happens
Combination of elements from more than one language in a discourse or sentence stemming from incomplete knowledge of one language
Reasons for mixing
Gap-filling
In order to fill a lexical gap
Don’t know the word in one language
Non-balanced language
One language is more dominant than the other
But only very unbalanced
What can mixing tell us about how languages are represented in the mind?
If languages were completely separate for the speaker, then mixing wouldn’t occur
The extent of mixing tells us how separate the languages are
The kind of elements that are mixed tells us about what are separate and what are interrelated
