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Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Bilingualism and Multilingualism L Wei, University of London, London, UK ã 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary Affective filter hypothesis Emotions function as a filter that reduces the amount of language input the learner is able to comprehend. Negative emotions such as anxiety, self-doubt, and mere boredom interfere with the process of acquiring a second language. Positive emotions such as interest and self-esteem can facilitate the process. BAMFLA Bilingual and multilingual first language acquisition, that is, acquiring more than one language simultaneously as first language from birth. Code-switching Alternation between languages in the same conversational interaction or across different modalities such as sign and speech. Compound bilingual A bilingual who has learned two languages at the same time and often in the same context. Coordinative bilingual A bilingual who has learned two languages in different contexts and kept the two languages fairly separately. Critical period hypothesis A hypothesis that claims that there is an ideal ‘window’ of time to acquire language, after which this is no longer possible, that is, language acquisition is biologically linked to age. Input hypothesis Also known as the comprehensible input hypothesis, it claims that learners acquire a language only when they receive comprehensible input. Interaction hypothesis A hypothesis that proposes that language acquisition is strongly facilitated by the use of the target language in interaction. Language contact Situations where groups of speakers of different languages are in contact with each other. Language contact is the main cause of bilingualism and multilingualism.
Language ideology or linguistic ideology The explicit and implicit attitudes regarding language that define what is perceived as proper speech or good language behavior. It also encompasses what people believe a particular language can do for its users and the user community. Language socialization A process whereby children and other novices in society acquire tacit knowledge of principles of social order and systems of belief through exposure to and participation in language-mediated interaction. It involves both socialization through language and socialization to use language. Negative motivation A response that involves the undertaking of tasks for fear that there should be undesirable outcomes. Negotiation of identity A process through which people reach agreements regarding ‘who is who’ in their relationships. It helps to establish what people can expect of one another. Output hypothesis A hypothesis that claims that meaningful output is as necessary to language learning as meaningful input. Positive motivation A response which includes enjoyment and optimism about the tasks that the learner is involved in. Sign bilingualism Dual modality bilingualism of sign language and other human languages. Subordinative bilingual A bilingual whose two languages are not of equal status or proficiency level, with one being subordinate to the other in structure, cognitive processing, and usage.
Introduction
Pathways to Bilingualism and Multilingualism
One of the major discoveries of modern linguistic science is that human beings have the capacity to learn as many languages as they are willing to and as they are allowed to by the social conditions. In principle then, anybody can be bilingual and multilingual. Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s population is bilingual and multilingual. Nevertheless, there are different pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism, and there are plenty of examples of people who have failed to acquire a language sufficiently to communicate with others in it, or those who, despite knowing other languages, function as monolinguals. The questions then are the following:
People often assume that bilingualism and multilingualism are for the privileged few – those who have had a good schooling where they learned new languages and those who have traveled a lot or lived in different countries. Education and migration, either temporary or long-term, are clearly opportunities for learning languages, but most people become bilingual and multilingual within their immediate families and communities. Table 1 illustrates six different processes whereby children can become bilingual or multilingual at home. There are many other factors that can lead individuals on to a path to bilingualism and multilingualism. Most of them are external to the individual’s cognitive capacities but have something to do with the broader social environment. For example, political or military acts such as colonization, annexation, resettlement, and federation of a country or region can have critical linguistic effects. People may become refugees, either in
• •
What are the conditions that facilitate the learning and use of multiple languages? As far as individuals are concerned, what does it mean to be bilingual or multilingual?
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Table 1
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Processes of bilingual acquisition Parent
Community
Strategy
The parents have different native languages with each having some degree of competence in the other’s language The parents have different native languages
The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community
The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth
The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community
3. Nondominant home language without community support 4. Double nondominant home language without community support 5. Nonnative parents
The parents share the same native language
The dominant language is not that of the parents
Both parents speak the nondominant language to the child, who is fully exposed to the dominant language only when outside the home, and in particular in nursery school The parents speak their own language to the child
The parents have different native languages
The dominant language is different from either of the parents’ languages The dominant language is the same as that of the parents
6. Mixed languages
The parents are bilingual
1. One person one language
2. Nondominant home language/one language one environment
The parents share the same native language
Sectors of community may also be bilingual
a new place or in their homeland, and be required to learn the language of their new environment. After a successful military invasion, the indigenous population may have to learn the invader’s language in order to prosper. Colonization is exemplified by the former British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America, most of which achieved independence in the nineteenth century. A modern example of annexation can be found in the absorption of the Baltic republics – Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In the latter part of the twentieth century, military conflicts in Central Africa and the former Yugoslavia have seen the resettlement of people of different ethnic backgrounds. Examples of federations where diverse ethnic groups or nationalities are united under the political control of one state include Switzerland, Belgium, and Cameroon. Individuals in these countries and regions may have the opportunity to become bilingual or multilingual. Similarly, natural disasters such as famine, floods, and volcanic eruptions can be the cause of major movements of population. New language contact situations emerge as people begin to resettle. Some of the Irish and Chinese resettlements in North America have been the result of natural disasters. People are exposed to new languages as a result of the resettlements. In today’s world, the availability of information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the Internet, has led to a further expansion of the use of certain languages across the world. People who wish to use modern technologies need to learn and use the languages of the media. Some of the pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism may be more personal than environmental. For instance, people may wish to live in a country because of its religious significance, or to leave a country because of its religious oppression. In either case, a new language may have to be learned. The Russian speakers in Israel are a case in point. Similarly, very large numbers of people across the world have migrated to find work and to improve their standard of living. The economic
The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth One of the parents always addresses the child in a language which is not his/her native language Parents code-switch and mix languages
factor accounts for most of the linguistic diversity of the United States and for the increasing proportion of multilingualism in present-day Europe.
Factors Contributing to the Success or Failure of Becoming Bilingual and Multilingual From the above list, one can easily conclude that becoming bilingual or multilingual is a consequence of what the environment provides the individual with and has little to do with individuals’ mental capacity. Yes, it is true that in theory anyone could learn as many languages as he or she wishes to. But the reality is that not everyone becomes bilingual or multilingual even if the environmental conditions are favorable for language learning. It is certainly a fact that not everyone becomes equally proficient in the languages he or she learns even if he or she is exposed to the same learning conditions. Linguists have spent a great deal of time investigating the various factors that lead to success or failure in becoming bilingual and multilingual. Some of the factors appear to be learnerinternal, that is, they are conditioned by the learner’s biological and cognitive capacities, while others are more social. Research evidence suggests that human beings’ ability to learn languages is closely related to age and memory capacity. Infants seem to be able to acquire new languages with great ease, whereas adults often have difficulty in achieving the same level of fluency or accuracy in the later-learned languages. Such facts gave rise to the ‘critical period hypothesis,’ which claims that there is an ideal age to acquire a language in a linguistically rich environment, after which the individual will never achieve a full command of the language. However, there is little agreement as to what that critical period is. Research results are varied: some demonstrate that prepubescent children acquire language easily, and some that older learners have a certain advantage and can achieve native-level
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proficiency. Brain plasticity has often been cited as the factor underlying the critical period. More recently, it has been suggested that the delayed development of the prefrontal cortex in children and a concomitant delay in the development of cognitive control may facilitate convention learning, allowing young children to learn language far more easily than cognitively mature adults and older children. Nevertheless, this is a highly controversial and vital topic for research. Advances in brain imaging technologies are generating new findings all the time. Many researchers do not believe in the existence of the critical period for language learning at all. Instead, they point to social and environmental factors, attitude, motivation, input and interaction, as well as pedagogical effect, and language policy. Individuals learn languages for very different reasons and with very different motivations: some learn new languages because they are married to speakers of other languages, while others seek employments that require the use of certain languages. Community attitudes toward the language being learned can also have a profound impact on the individual learners. Where the community has a broadly negative view of the target language and its speakers, or a negative view of its relation to them, learning is typically much more difficult. At the same time, the learner’s direct contact with the target language, that is, input, has a crucial impact on the learning process and learning outcome. Generally speaking, the amount of input a learner receives is one of the most important factors affecting his or her learning. However, it must be at a level that is comprehensible to the learner. In his study of second language learning, Stephen Krashen advanced the idea that language input should be at the ‘i þ 1’ level, that is, just beyond what the learner can fully understand. In other words, the input is comprehensible, but contains structures that are not yet fully understood. While there has been criticism of Krashen’s theory that factors other than structural difficulty (such as interest or presentation) can affect the actual conversion of input into intake, the i þ 1 idea has been found useful in language teaching. In contrast, Merrill Swain proposed an Output Hypothesis that meaningful output is as necessary to language learning as meaningful input. However, most studies have shown little if any correlation between learning and quantity of output. It is likely that meaningful output is important to language learning because the experience of producing language leads to more effective processing of input. A rather different perspective on success or failure of language learning is the so-called Interaction Hypothesis, which proposes that language acquisition is strongly facilitated by the use of the target language in interaction. In particular, the negotiation of meaning has been shown to contribute greatly to the acquisition of vocabulary. In addition to the Input Hypothesis, Krashen also proposed an Affective Filter Hypothesis, which claims that the relative success or failure of language learning is often filtered through motivation, attitude, and other affective factors. Many researchers have suggested that more motivated learners tend to be more successful. Motivation involves four key aspects: 1. A Goal 2. An Effort
3. A Desire to attain the goal 4. Favorable attitude toward the activity in question. It has been suggested that good L2 learners have the following characteristics. They
• • •
• • • • •
are willing and accurate guessers; have a strong drive to communicate; are often uninhibited, and if they are, they combat inhibition by using positive self-talk, by extensive use of practicing in private, and by putting themselves in situations where they have to participate communicatively; are willing to make mistakes; focus on form by looking for patterns and analyzing; take advantage of all practice opportunities; monitor their speech as well as that of others; and pay attention to meaning.
In short, they are more motivated and have a more positive attitude toward learning the language. Motivation is a desire to achieve a goal, combined with the energy to work toward that goal. It determines the extent of active, personal involvement in L2 learning. Sometimes, a distinction is made between positive and negative motivation. Positive motivation is a response which includes enjoyment and optimism about the tasks that you are involved in, whereas negative motivation involves undertaking tasks for fear that there should be undesirable outcomes. Questions then arise as to where positive and negative motivations came from, the answer to which lies largely in individuals’ personal experience. A person growing up in a multilingual environment where the majority of people he or she interacts with on a routine basis speak a variety of different languages freely and where there is no societal control over which language should be used in what manner would, at least in principle, have a more positive attitude toward learning new languages and using different languages. In contrast, a person who has been forced to learn or to drop a particular language or experienced drama in a particular language may develop a negative motivation. The links between personal experience and motivation and other affective and emotional aspects of language learning are an area worthy of further investigation. Other factors that researchers have examined in terms of success or failure of becoming bilingual and multilingual include gender and personality. These factors are at the interface between learners’ internal and external dimensions. Evidence from neuroscience suggests that boys and girls use different parts of their brains to process some basic aspects of grammar. Sociolinguists have shown that men and women use languages in different ways for communicative purposes. However, there is very little research into the gender differences in bilingual or second language acquisition. Some researchers have suggested that there are gender differences in motivations for language learning. It certainly seems to be the case that more girls than boys prefer to learn modern languages in schools and have somewhat better attainment in schoolbased language examinations. Yet none of the apparent difference can be solely attributed to biological differences between the two genders. It is more likely to be a sociocultural effect in that language learning and use is closely related to the different
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
roles of girls and boys and women and men in society. Similarly, some personality traits have been linked to the relative success or failure in second or additional language learning. Extraverts or unreserved and outgoing people tend to acquire a second language better than introverts or shy people. But extraversion and introversion are sociocultural constructs, rather than biologically determined.
What Does it Mean to Be Bilingual or Multilingual? In theory, these different routes to bilingualism would result in different language behaviors and cognitive organizations of the bilingual brain. But at the moment, there is very little systematic research linking the process of bilingual acquisition with the outcome of bilinguality at the individual level. What we do know, however, is that the different languages being acquired by the child do not always develop at the same speed or to the same level, resulting in different configurations of language dominance in individual children and different proficiencies in the languages. In an early study, Uriel Weinreich proposed three types of bilinguals representing three types of relationship between the linguistic sign (or signifier) and the semantic content (signified). In Type A, the individual combines a signifier from each language with a separate unit of signified. Weinreich called them ‘coordinative’ (later often called ‘coordinate’) bilinguals. In Type B, the individual identifies two signifiers but regards them as a single compound, or composite, unit of signified; hence they are called ‘compound’ bilinguals. Type C relates to people who learn a new language with the help of a previously acquired one. They are called ‘subordinative’ (or ‘subordinate’) bilinguals. His examples were from English and Russian: ‘book’
‘kniga’
│
│
(a) /buk/
/kn’iga/ ‘book’ = ‘kniga’
(b)
/buk/
/kn’iga/
‘book’ │ /buk/ │ (c)
/kn’iga/
Weinreich’s typology is often misinterpreted in the literature as referring to differences in the degree of proficiency in the languages. But it is a fact that the relationship between the language proficiency and cognitive organization of the bilingual individual, as conceptualized in Weinreich’s model, is far from clear. Some ‘subordinate’ bilinguals demonstrate a very high level of proficiency in processing both languages,
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as evidenced in grammaticality and fluency of speech, while some ‘coordinative’ bilinguals show difficulties in processing two languages simultaneously (i.e., in code-switching or in ‘foreign’ words identification tasks). It must also be stressed that, using Weinreich’s distinctions, bilingual individuals are distributed along a continuum from a subordinate or compound end to a coordinate end, and can at the same time be more subordinate or compound for certain concepts and more coordinate for others, depending on, among other things, the age and context of acquisition. There are now a number of psycholinguistic models of the bilingual lexicon, including the Concept Mediation Model, the Word Association model, and the Revised Hierarchical Model. These models take into consideration factors such as proficiency level, age, and context of acquisition and have much more explanatory power than the earlier models for bilingual language use. In terms of bilingual and multilingual first language acquisition (BAMFLA), that is, acquiring multiple languages from birth, both linguists and psychologists have spent a considerable amount of time investigating the developmental patterns of bilingual and multilingual children. Earlier studies suggested that bilingual acquisition went through three key stages: Stage I: The child has one lexical system comprising words from both languages. Stage II: The child distinguishes two different lexicons, but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages. Stage III: The child speaks two languages that are different both in lexicon and syntax, but each language is associated with the person who uses that language. Although some studies have produced evidence supporting the model, there has been much criticism, particularly of the claims made regarding the first two stages. This is generally known as the ‘one-system-or-two’ debate, that is, whether bilingual children begin with a fused linguistic system and gradually differentiate the two languages, or whether they start with a differentiated system. Part of this debate centers around the question: What counts as evidence for differentiation or fusion? Some researchers based their decision on whether the child made appropriate sociolinguistic choices, that is, whether the child spoke the ‘right’ language to the ‘right’ person. It was argued that awareness of the two languages as distinct plays a crucial role in deciding the issue of differentiation, and a child’s ability to make appropriate language choices reflects that awareness. However, the argument that bilingual children separate the languages when they are aware that there are two systems is circular, unless some criterion is provided for assessing whether awareness means anything other than children separating the languages. In any case, we need to bear in mind that a child’s apparent (in)ability to choose the right language for the right addressee is a rather different issue from whether the child has one or two linguistic systems. Part of the problem is the familiar one of what we can infer about competence from performance. There now exists a large body of literature rebutting the ‘fused’ system hypothesis, arguing instead that bilinguals have two distinct but interdependent systems from the very start. Is bilingual acquisition the same as monolingual acquisition? Theoretically, separate development is possible without
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there being any similarity with monolingual acquisition. Most researchers argue that bilingual children’s language development is by and large the same as that of monolingual children. In very general terms, both bilingual and monolingual children go through an initial babbling stage, followed by the oneword stage, the two-word stage, the multiword stage, and the multiclause stage. At the morphosyntactic level, a number of studies have reported similarities rather than differences between bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Nevertheless, one needs to be careful in the kinds of conclusions one draws from such evidence. Similarities between bilingual and monolingual acquisition do not mean that (1) the two languages a bilingual child is acquiring develop in the same way or at the same speed; (2) the two languages a bilingual child is acquiring do not influence and interact with each other. For example, studies have found that while 2–3-year-old French–English bilingual children displayed patterns that characterize the performance of monolingual children acquiring these languages separately and they acquired these patterns within the same age range as monolingual children, they (1) used finite verb forms earlier in French than in English; (2) used subject pronouns in French exclusively with finite verbs but subject pronouns in English with both finite and nonfinite verbs, in accordance with the status of French clitic subject pronouns (or agreement markers) as against full NPs in English; and (3) placed verbal negatives after lexical verbs in French (e.g., n’aime pas) but before lexical verbs in English (do not like). There is one area in which bilingual children clearly differ from monolingual children, namely, code-mixing. Studies show that bilingual children mix elements from both languages in the same utterance as soon as they can produce two-word utterances. As with adult code switching, bilingual children’s language mixing is highly structured. The operation of constraints based on surface features of grammar, such as word order, is evident from the two-word/-morpheme stage onward, and the operation of constraints based on abstract notions of grammatical knowledge is most evident in bilingual children once they demonstrate such knowledge overtly (e.g., verb tense and agreement markings), usually around 2.6 years of age and older. These findings suggest that, in addition to the linguistic competence to formulate correct monolingual strings, bilingual children have the added capacity to coordinate their two languages online in accordance with the grammatical constraints of both languages during mixing. While these studies provide further evidence for the separate development, or two-systems, argument, they also suggest that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between bilingual acquisition and monolingual acquisition. The ability to switch from one language to another turns out to be a crucial aspect of being bilingual and multilingual. Indeed, one cannot tell who is or who isn’t a bilingual until the person uses two or more languages in the same conversation. There is a widespread impression that bilingual speakers codeswitch because they cannot express themselves adequately in one language. This may be true to some extent when a bilingual is momentarily lost for words in one of his or her languages. However, code-switching is an extremely common practice among bilinguals and takes many forms. A long narrative may be divided into different parts which are expressed in different languages; sentences may begin in one language
and finish in another; words and phrases from different languages may succeed each other. Linguists have devoted much attention to the study of code-switching. It has been demonstrated that code-switching involves skilled manipulation of overlapping sections of two (or more) grammars, and that there is virtually no instance of ungrammatical combination of two languages in code-switching, regardless of the bilingual ability of the speaker. Some suggest that code-switching is itself a discrete mode of speaking. One important aspect of code-switching is that the two languages involved do not play the same role in sentence making. Typically, one language sets the grammatical framework, with the other providing certain items to fit into the framework. Code-switching therefore is not a simple combination of two sets of grammatical rules but grammatical integration of one language in another. Bilingual speakers of different proficiency levels in their two languages or speaking two typologically different languages can engage in code-switching and indeed vary it according to their needs. There is a group of bilinguals who engage themselves in cross-modality language production. This is the case with speech–sign bilinguals who, in addition to the oral modality, use the manual–visual modality in everyday communication. They are special in one aspect: that is, the two different modalities allow for the simultaneous production of the two languages. In other words, one can speak and sign at the same time. Research has shown that such simultaneous bimodal production is typically exemplified by the use of lexical items from both languages but only one set of grammatical rules, which is usually from the spoken language. Right now, we know relatively little about how the two linguistic systems interact in the language production and processing of speech–sign bilinguals. Indeed, much more work needs to be undertaken before we can fully appreciate the complexity of the language behavior of bilinguals in general. It should be emphasized that code-switching is not only an effective means of communication but also an act of identity. Every time bilingual speakers say something in one language when they might just as easily have said it in another, they are reconnecting with people, situations, and power configurations from their history of past interactions and imprinting on that history their attitudes toward the people and languages concerned. Through language choice, they maintain and change ethnic group boundaries and personal relationships, and construct and define ‘self’ and ‘other’ within a broader political economy and historical context. So, the issue of language use of bilinguals and multilinguals becomes an issue of identity and identification. The notion of identity has gone through considerable change in sociolinguistics. In the earlier variationist sociolinguistic work, identity was taken to mean the speaker’s socioeconomic class, gender, age, or place of origin. It is assumed that speakers express, rather than negotiate, identities through their language use. Several scholars later criticized such assumptions and argued instead that identities are negotiated through social interaction. Linguistic forms and strategies have multiple functions and cannot be directly linked to particular identities outside of interactional contexts. More recent studies by sociolinguists have emphasized the negotiation of identities and demonstrated that identities are local constructions.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Parallel to the work on multilingualism and negotiation of identities, sociolinguists critically examine some of the concepts and notions commonly used by other researchers in the field of bilingualism and multilingualism. For example, the very idea of code-switching raises questions as to what a language is. Instead of thinking of languages as discrete systems, sociolinguists tend to see multilingual speakers as actors of social life who draw on complex sets of communicative resources which are unevenly distributed and unevenly valued. The linguistic systematicity therefore appears to be at least as much a function of historically rooted ideologies (of nation and ethnicity) and of the ordering practices of social life as of language per se. This perspective goes beyond a focus on mental representation of linguistic knowledge and opens up the possibility of looking at bilingualism and multilingualism as a matter of ideology, communicative practice, and social process. This particular sociolinguistic perspective has important implications for the way researchers collect, analyze, and interpret data. Informed by developments in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, sociolinguists have examined communicative practices within and across sites that can be ethnographically demonstrated to be linked. Working with the ideas of trajectories (of speakers, linguistic resources, discourses, institutions) across time and space and of discursive spaces which allow for, and also constrain, the production and circulation of discourses, sociolinguists have examined multilingual practices in a number of communities and argued that multilingual practices contribute to the construction of social boundaries and of the resources those boundaries regulate. They therefore also raise the question of the social and historical conditions that allow for the development of particular regimes of language, for their reproduction, their contestation, and, eventually, their modification or transformation. A further, closely related, area in which sociolinguists have extended the work by linguists and psycholinguists on bilingualism is that of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Building on earlier research on language socialization, which focused on young children acquiring their first language in culturally specific ways, they have examined bilingual and multilingual children’s developing competence in various speech and literacy events. Particular attention is given to the range of linguistic resources available, or not, in bilingual and multilingual communities and the ways in which children, as well as adolescents and adults, learn to choose among these resources for their symbolic value. The researchers emphasized language socialization as an interactive process, in which those being socialized also act as agents rather than as mere passive initiates. This line of inquiry also demonstrates how domains of knowledge are constructed through language and cultural practices, and how the individual’s positioning affects the process of knowledge acquisition and construction.
Conclusion Increased contacts with peoples speaking different languages as a result of globalization mean that bilingualism and multilingualism are becoming more commonplace a phenomenon for
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today’s world. People are more aware of the linguistic diversity around them. As the article shows, there is a considerable amount of knowledge related to bilingual and multilingual individuals, the manner in which they acquire languages, and the way they use them in daily life. Paradoxically, however, much of the research still uses the monolingual as the yardstick and often sees bilingualism as a deviation from the norm. Many issues also require further empirical research: for example, the organization of the bilingual brain; the structure and organization of the bilingual’s different languages; the various processing operations involved in the perception, production, and memorization of language when the speaker is using one or all his or her languages; and the linguistic and psycholinguistic differences and similarities between code-switching, borrowing, and interference. Advances in research technologies will clearly help the field to develop more sophisticated methods. Research findings will have impacts on policy and practice regarding the bilingual and multilingual individuals as well as the communities they form and live in.
Further Reading Bialystok E (2001) Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. De Houwer A (2009) Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Genesee F (1989) Early bilingual language development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language 16: 161–179. Krashen SD (1985) The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. New York: Longman. Krashen SD (2003) Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Kroll J and Stewart E (1984) Category interference in translation and picture naming. Journal of Memory and Language 33: 149–174. Lenneberg EH (1967) Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. Li W (2007) The Bilingualism Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Long MH (1981) Input interaction and second language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 379: 259–278. Meisel JM (1989) Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In: Hyltenstam K and Obler L (eds.) Bilingualism Across the Lifespan: Aspects of Acquisition, Maturity, and Loss, pp. 13–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter MC, So K-F, Von Echardt B, and Feldman LB (1984) Lexical and conceptual representation in beginning and more proficient bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 23: 23–38. Romaine S (1989/1995) Bilingualism, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Singleton D and Lengyel Z (1995) The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Swain M and Lapkin S (1995) Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step toward language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391. Volterra V and Taeschner T (1978) The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language 5: 311–326. Weinreich U (1953) Languages in Contact: Findings and problems. New York: The Linguistic Circle of New York; Reissued by Mouton in The Hague, 1968.
Glossary Affective filter hypothesis Emotions function as a filter that reduces the amount of language input the learner is able to comprehend. Negative emotions such as anxiety, self-doubt, and mere boredom interfere with the process of acquiring a second language. Positive emotions such as interest and self-esteem can facilitate the process. BAMFLA Bilingual and multilingual first language acquisition, that is, acquiring more than one language simultaneously as first language from birth. Code-switching Alternation between languages in the same conversational interaction or across different modalities such as sign and speech. Compound bilingual A bilingual who has learned two languages at the same time and often in the same context. Coordinative bilingual A bilingual who has learned two languages in different contexts and kept the two languages fairly separately. Critical period hypothesis A hypothesis that claims that there is an ideal ‘window’ of time to acquire language, after which this is no longer possible, that is, language acquisition is biologically linked to age. Input hypothesis Also known as the comprehensible input hypothesis, it claims that learners acquire a language only when they receive comprehensible input. Interaction hypothesis A hypothesis that proposes that language acquisition is strongly facilitated by the use of the target language in interaction. Language contact Situations where groups of speakers of different languages are in contact with each other. Language contact is the main cause of bilingualism and multilingualism.
Language ideology or linguistic ideology The explicit and implicit attitudes regarding language that define what is perceived as proper speech or good language behavior. It also encompasses what people believe a particular language can do for its users and the user community. Language socialization A process whereby children and other novices in society acquire tacit knowledge of principles of social order and systems of belief through exposure to and participation in language-mediated interaction. It involves both socialization through language and socialization to use language. Negative motivation A response that involves the undertaking of tasks for fear that there should be undesirable outcomes. Negotiation of identity A process through which people reach agreements regarding ‘who is who’ in their relationships. It helps to establish what people can expect of one another. Output hypothesis A hypothesis that claims that meaningful output is as necessary to language learning as meaningful input. Positive motivation A response which includes enjoyment and optimism about the tasks that the learner is involved in. Sign bilingualism Dual modality bilingualism of sign language and other human languages. Subordinative bilingual A bilingual whose two languages are not of equal status or proficiency level, with one being subordinate to the other in structure, cognitive processing, and usage.
Introduction
Pathways to Bilingualism and Multilingualism
One of the major discoveries of modern linguistic science is that human beings have the capacity to learn as many languages as they are willing to and as they are allowed to by the social conditions. In principle then, anybody can be bilingual and multilingual. Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s population is bilingual and multilingual. Nevertheless, there are different pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism, and there are plenty of examples of people who have failed to acquire a language sufficiently to communicate with others in it, or those who, despite knowing other languages, function as monolinguals. The questions then are the following:
People often assume that bilingualism and multilingualism are for the privileged few – those who have had a good schooling where they learned new languages and those who have traveled a lot or lived in different countries. Education and migration, either temporary or long-term, are clearly opportunities for learning languages, but most people become bilingual and multilingual within their immediate families and communities. Table 1 illustrates six different processes whereby children can become bilingual or multilingual at home. There are many other factors that can lead individuals on to a path to bilingualism and multilingualism. Most of them are external to the individual’s cognitive capacities but have something to do with the broader social environment. For example, political or military acts such as colonization, annexation, resettlement, and federation of a country or region can have critical linguistic effects. People may become refugees, either in
• •
What are the conditions that facilitate the learning and use of multiple languages? As far as individuals are concerned, what does it mean to be bilingual or multilingual?
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Table 1
339
Processes of bilingual acquisition Parent
Community
Strategy
The parents have different native languages with each having some degree of competence in the other’s language The parents have different native languages
The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community
The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth
The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community
3. Nondominant home language without community support 4. Double nondominant home language without community support 5. Nonnative parents
The parents share the same native language
The dominant language is not that of the parents
Both parents speak the nondominant language to the child, who is fully exposed to the dominant language only when outside the home, and in particular in nursery school The parents speak their own language to the child
The parents have different native languages
The dominant language is different from either of the parents’ languages The dominant language is the same as that of the parents
6. Mixed languages
The parents are bilingual
1. One person one language
2. Nondominant home language/one language one environment
The parents share the same native language
Sectors of community may also be bilingual
a new place or in their homeland, and be required to learn the language of their new environment. After a successful military invasion, the indigenous population may have to learn the invader’s language in order to prosper. Colonization is exemplified by the former British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America, most of which achieved independence in the nineteenth century. A modern example of annexation can be found in the absorption of the Baltic republics – Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In the latter part of the twentieth century, military conflicts in Central Africa and the former Yugoslavia have seen the resettlement of people of different ethnic backgrounds. Examples of federations where diverse ethnic groups or nationalities are united under the political control of one state include Switzerland, Belgium, and Cameroon. Individuals in these countries and regions may have the opportunity to become bilingual or multilingual. Similarly, natural disasters such as famine, floods, and volcanic eruptions can be the cause of major movements of population. New language contact situations emerge as people begin to resettle. Some of the Irish and Chinese resettlements in North America have been the result of natural disasters. People are exposed to new languages as a result of the resettlements. In today’s world, the availability of information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the Internet, has led to a further expansion of the use of certain languages across the world. People who wish to use modern technologies need to learn and use the languages of the media. Some of the pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism may be more personal than environmental. For instance, people may wish to live in a country because of its religious significance, or to leave a country because of its religious oppression. In either case, a new language may have to be learned. The Russian speakers in Israel are a case in point. Similarly, very large numbers of people across the world have migrated to find work and to improve their standard of living. The economic
The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth One of the parents always addresses the child in a language which is not his/her native language Parents code-switch and mix languages
factor accounts for most of the linguistic diversity of the United States and for the increasing proportion of multilingualism in present-day Europe.
Factors Contributing to the Success or Failure of Becoming Bilingual and Multilingual From the above list, one can easily conclude that becoming bilingual or multilingual is a consequence of what the environment provides the individual with and has little to do with individuals’ mental capacity. Yes, it is true that in theory anyone could learn as many languages as he or she wishes to. But the reality is that not everyone becomes bilingual or multilingual even if the environmental conditions are favorable for language learning. It is certainly a fact that not everyone becomes equally proficient in the languages he or she learns even if he or she is exposed to the same learning conditions. Linguists have spent a great deal of time investigating the various factors that lead to success or failure in becoming bilingual and multilingual. Some of the factors appear to be learnerinternal, that is, they are conditioned by the learner’s biological and cognitive capacities, while others are more social. Research evidence suggests that human beings’ ability to learn languages is closely related to age and memory capacity. Infants seem to be able to acquire new languages with great ease, whereas adults often have difficulty in achieving the same level of fluency or accuracy in the later-learned languages. Such facts gave rise to the ‘critical period hypothesis,’ which claims that there is an ideal age to acquire a language in a linguistically rich environment, after which the individual will never achieve a full command of the language. However, there is little agreement as to what that critical period is. Research results are varied: some demonstrate that prepubescent children acquire language easily, and some that older learners have a certain advantage and can achieve native-level
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proficiency. Brain plasticity has often been cited as the factor underlying the critical period. More recently, it has been suggested that the delayed development of the prefrontal cortex in children and a concomitant delay in the development of cognitive control may facilitate convention learning, allowing young children to learn language far more easily than cognitively mature adults and older children. Nevertheless, this is a highly controversial and vital topic for research. Advances in brain imaging technologies are generating new findings all the time. Many researchers do not believe in the existence of the critical period for language learning at all. Instead, they point to social and environmental factors, attitude, motivation, input and interaction, as well as pedagogical effect, and language policy. Individuals learn languages for very different reasons and with very different motivations: some learn new languages because they are married to speakers of other languages, while others seek employments that require the use of certain languages. Community attitudes toward the language being learned can also have a profound impact on the individual learners. Where the community has a broadly negative view of the target language and its speakers, or a negative view of its relation to them, learning is typically much more difficult. At the same time, the learner’s direct contact with the target language, that is, input, has a crucial impact on the learning process and learning outcome. Generally speaking, the amount of input a learner receives is one of the most important factors affecting his or her learning. However, it must be at a level that is comprehensible to the learner. In his study of second language learning, Stephen Krashen advanced the idea that language input should be at the ‘i þ 1’ level, that is, just beyond what the learner can fully understand. In other words, the input is comprehensible, but contains structures that are not yet fully understood. While there has been criticism of Krashen’s theory that factors other than structural difficulty (such as interest or presentation) can affect the actual conversion of input into intake, the i þ 1 idea has been found useful in language teaching. In contrast, Merrill Swain proposed an Output Hypothesis that meaningful output is as necessary to language learning as meaningful input. However, most studies have shown little if any correlation between learning and quantity of output. It is likely that meaningful output is important to language learning because the experience of producing language leads to more effective processing of input. A rather different perspective on success or failure of language learning is the so-called Interaction Hypothesis, which proposes that language acquisition is strongly facilitated by the use of the target language in interaction. In particular, the negotiation of meaning has been shown to contribute greatly to the acquisition of vocabulary. In addition to the Input Hypothesis, Krashen also proposed an Affective Filter Hypothesis, which claims that the relative success or failure of language learning is often filtered through motivation, attitude, and other affective factors. Many researchers have suggested that more motivated learners tend to be more successful. Motivation involves four key aspects: 1. A Goal 2. An Effort
3. A Desire to attain the goal 4. Favorable attitude toward the activity in question. It has been suggested that good L2 learners have the following characteristics. They
• • •
• • • • •
are willing and accurate guessers; have a strong drive to communicate; are often uninhibited, and if they are, they combat inhibition by using positive self-talk, by extensive use of practicing in private, and by putting themselves in situations where they have to participate communicatively; are willing to make mistakes; focus on form by looking for patterns and analyzing; take advantage of all practice opportunities; monitor their speech as well as that of others; and pay attention to meaning.
In short, they are more motivated and have a more positive attitude toward learning the language. Motivation is a desire to achieve a goal, combined with the energy to work toward that goal. It determines the extent of active, personal involvement in L2 learning. Sometimes, a distinction is made between positive and negative motivation. Positive motivation is a response which includes enjoyment and optimism about the tasks that you are involved in, whereas negative motivation involves undertaking tasks for fear that there should be undesirable outcomes. Questions then arise as to where positive and negative motivations came from, the answer to which lies largely in individuals’ personal experience. A person growing up in a multilingual environment where the majority of people he or she interacts with on a routine basis speak a variety of different languages freely and where there is no societal control over which language should be used in what manner would, at least in principle, have a more positive attitude toward learning new languages and using different languages. In contrast, a person who has been forced to learn or to drop a particular language or experienced drama in a particular language may develop a negative motivation. The links between personal experience and motivation and other affective and emotional aspects of language learning are an area worthy of further investigation. Other factors that researchers have examined in terms of success or failure of becoming bilingual and multilingual include gender and personality. These factors are at the interface between learners’ internal and external dimensions. Evidence from neuroscience suggests that boys and girls use different parts of their brains to process some basic aspects of grammar. Sociolinguists have shown that men and women use languages in different ways for communicative purposes. However, there is very little research into the gender differences in bilingual or second language acquisition. Some researchers have suggested that there are gender differences in motivations for language learning. It certainly seems to be the case that more girls than boys prefer to learn modern languages in schools and have somewhat better attainment in schoolbased language examinations. Yet none of the apparent difference can be solely attributed to biological differences between the two genders. It is more likely to be a sociocultural effect in that language learning and use is closely related to the different
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roles of girls and boys and women and men in society. Similarly, some personality traits have been linked to the relative success or failure in second or additional language learning. Extraverts or unreserved and outgoing people tend to acquire a second language better than introverts or shy people. But extraversion and introversion are sociocultural constructs, rather than biologically determined.
What Does it Mean to Be Bilingual or Multilingual? In theory, these different routes to bilingualism would result in different language behaviors and cognitive organizations of the bilingual brain. But at the moment, there is very little systematic research linking the process of bilingual acquisition with the outcome of bilinguality at the individual level. What we do know, however, is that the different languages being acquired by the child do not always develop at the same speed or to the same level, resulting in different configurations of language dominance in individual children and different proficiencies in the languages. In an early study, Uriel Weinreich proposed three types of bilinguals representing three types of relationship between the linguistic sign (or signifier) and the semantic content (signified). In Type A, the individual combines a signifier from each language with a separate unit of signified. Weinreich called them ‘coordinative’ (later often called ‘coordinate’) bilinguals. In Type B, the individual identifies two signifiers but regards them as a single compound, or composite, unit of signified; hence they are called ‘compound’ bilinguals. Type C relates to people who learn a new language with the help of a previously acquired one. They are called ‘subordinative’ (or ‘subordinate’) bilinguals. His examples were from English and Russian: ‘book’
‘kniga’
│
│
(a) /buk/
/kn’iga/ ‘book’ = ‘kniga’
(b)
/buk/
/kn’iga/
‘book’ │ /buk/ │ (c)
/kn’iga/
Weinreich’s typology is often misinterpreted in the literature as referring to differences in the degree of proficiency in the languages. But it is a fact that the relationship between the language proficiency and cognitive organization of the bilingual individual, as conceptualized in Weinreich’s model, is far from clear. Some ‘subordinate’ bilinguals demonstrate a very high level of proficiency in processing both languages,
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as evidenced in grammaticality and fluency of speech, while some ‘coordinative’ bilinguals show difficulties in processing two languages simultaneously (i.e., in code-switching or in ‘foreign’ words identification tasks). It must also be stressed that, using Weinreich’s distinctions, bilingual individuals are distributed along a continuum from a subordinate or compound end to a coordinate end, and can at the same time be more subordinate or compound for certain concepts and more coordinate for others, depending on, among other things, the age and context of acquisition. There are now a number of psycholinguistic models of the bilingual lexicon, including the Concept Mediation Model, the Word Association model, and the Revised Hierarchical Model. These models take into consideration factors such as proficiency level, age, and context of acquisition and have much more explanatory power than the earlier models for bilingual language use. In terms of bilingual and multilingual first language acquisition (BAMFLA), that is, acquiring multiple languages from birth, both linguists and psychologists have spent a considerable amount of time investigating the developmental patterns of bilingual and multilingual children. Earlier studies suggested that bilingual acquisition went through three key stages: Stage I: The child has one lexical system comprising words from both languages. Stage II: The child distinguishes two different lexicons, but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages. Stage III: The child speaks two languages that are different both in lexicon and syntax, but each language is associated with the person who uses that language. Although some studies have produced evidence supporting the model, there has been much criticism, particularly of the claims made regarding the first two stages. This is generally known as the ‘one-system-or-two’ debate, that is, whether bilingual children begin with a fused linguistic system and gradually differentiate the two languages, or whether they start with a differentiated system. Part of this debate centers around the question: What counts as evidence for differentiation or fusion? Some researchers based their decision on whether the child made appropriate sociolinguistic choices, that is, whether the child spoke the ‘right’ language to the ‘right’ person. It was argued that awareness of the two languages as distinct plays a crucial role in deciding the issue of differentiation, and a child’s ability to make appropriate language choices reflects that awareness. However, the argument that bilingual children separate the languages when they are aware that there are two systems is circular, unless some criterion is provided for assessing whether awareness means anything other than children separating the languages. In any case, we need to bear in mind that a child’s apparent (in)ability to choose the right language for the right addressee is a rather different issue from whether the child has one or two linguistic systems. Part of the problem is the familiar one of what we can infer about competence from performance. There now exists a large body of literature rebutting the ‘fused’ system hypothesis, arguing instead that bilinguals have two distinct but interdependent systems from the very start. Is bilingual acquisition the same as monolingual acquisition? Theoretically, separate development is possible without
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there being any similarity with monolingual acquisition. Most researchers argue that bilingual children’s language development is by and large the same as that of monolingual children. In very general terms, both bilingual and monolingual children go through an initial babbling stage, followed by the oneword stage, the two-word stage, the multiword stage, and the multiclause stage. At the morphosyntactic level, a number of studies have reported similarities rather than differences between bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Nevertheless, one needs to be careful in the kinds of conclusions one draws from such evidence. Similarities between bilingual and monolingual acquisition do not mean that (1) the two languages a bilingual child is acquiring develop in the same way or at the same speed; (2) the two languages a bilingual child is acquiring do not influence and interact with each other. For example, studies have found that while 2–3-year-old French–English bilingual children displayed patterns that characterize the performance of monolingual children acquiring these languages separately and they acquired these patterns within the same age range as monolingual children, they (1) used finite verb forms earlier in French than in English; (2) used subject pronouns in French exclusively with finite verbs but subject pronouns in English with both finite and nonfinite verbs, in accordance with the status of French clitic subject pronouns (or agreement markers) as against full NPs in English; and (3) placed verbal negatives after lexical verbs in French (e.g., n’aime pas) but before lexical verbs in English (do not like). There is one area in which bilingual children clearly differ from monolingual children, namely, code-mixing. Studies show that bilingual children mix elements from both languages in the same utterance as soon as they can produce two-word utterances. As with adult code switching, bilingual children’s language mixing is highly structured. The operation of constraints based on surface features of grammar, such as word order, is evident from the two-word/-morpheme stage onward, and the operation of constraints based on abstract notions of grammatical knowledge is most evident in bilingual children once they demonstrate such knowledge overtly (e.g., verb tense and agreement markings), usually around 2.6 years of age and older. These findings suggest that, in addition to the linguistic competence to formulate correct monolingual strings, bilingual children have the added capacity to coordinate their two languages online in accordance with the grammatical constraints of both languages during mixing. While these studies provide further evidence for the separate development, or two-systems, argument, they also suggest that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between bilingual acquisition and monolingual acquisition. The ability to switch from one language to another turns out to be a crucial aspect of being bilingual and multilingual. Indeed, one cannot tell who is or who isn’t a bilingual until the person uses two or more languages in the same conversation. There is a widespread impression that bilingual speakers codeswitch because they cannot express themselves adequately in one language. This may be true to some extent when a bilingual is momentarily lost for words in one of his or her languages. However, code-switching is an extremely common practice among bilinguals and takes many forms. A long narrative may be divided into different parts which are expressed in different languages; sentences may begin in one language
and finish in another; words and phrases from different languages may succeed each other. Linguists have devoted much attention to the study of code-switching. It has been demonstrated that code-switching involves skilled manipulation of overlapping sections of two (or more) grammars, and that there is virtually no instance of ungrammatical combination of two languages in code-switching, regardless of the bilingual ability of the speaker. Some suggest that code-switching is itself a discrete mode of speaking. One important aspect of code-switching is that the two languages involved do not play the same role in sentence making. Typically, one language sets the grammatical framework, with the other providing certain items to fit into the framework. Code-switching therefore is not a simple combination of two sets of grammatical rules but grammatical integration of one language in another. Bilingual speakers of different proficiency levels in their two languages or speaking two typologically different languages can engage in code-switching and indeed vary it according to their needs. There is a group of bilinguals who engage themselves in cross-modality language production. This is the case with speech–sign bilinguals who, in addition to the oral modality, use the manual–visual modality in everyday communication. They are special in one aspect: that is, the two different modalities allow for the simultaneous production of the two languages. In other words, one can speak and sign at the same time. Research has shown that such simultaneous bimodal production is typically exemplified by the use of lexical items from both languages but only one set of grammatical rules, which is usually from the spoken language. Right now, we know relatively little about how the two linguistic systems interact in the language production and processing of speech–sign bilinguals. Indeed, much more work needs to be undertaken before we can fully appreciate the complexity of the language behavior of bilinguals in general. It should be emphasized that code-switching is not only an effective means of communication but also an act of identity. Every time bilingual speakers say something in one language when they might just as easily have said it in another, they are reconnecting with people, situations, and power configurations from their history of past interactions and imprinting on that history their attitudes toward the people and languages concerned. Through language choice, they maintain and change ethnic group boundaries and personal relationships, and construct and define ‘self’ and ‘other’ within a broader political economy and historical context. So, the issue of language use of bilinguals and multilinguals becomes an issue of identity and identification. The notion of identity has gone through considerable change in sociolinguistics. In the earlier variationist sociolinguistic work, identity was taken to mean the speaker’s socioeconomic class, gender, age, or place of origin. It is assumed that speakers express, rather than negotiate, identities through their language use. Several scholars later criticized such assumptions and argued instead that identities are negotiated through social interaction. Linguistic forms and strategies have multiple functions and cannot be directly linked to particular identities outside of interactional contexts. More recent studies by sociolinguists have emphasized the negotiation of identities and demonstrated that identities are local constructions.
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Parallel to the work on multilingualism and negotiation of identities, sociolinguists critically examine some of the concepts and notions commonly used by other researchers in the field of bilingualism and multilingualism. For example, the very idea of code-switching raises questions as to what a language is. Instead of thinking of languages as discrete systems, sociolinguists tend to see multilingual speakers as actors of social life who draw on complex sets of communicative resources which are unevenly distributed and unevenly valued. The linguistic systematicity therefore appears to be at least as much a function of historically rooted ideologies (of nation and ethnicity) and of the ordering practices of social life as of language per se. This perspective goes beyond a focus on mental representation of linguistic knowledge and opens up the possibility of looking at bilingualism and multilingualism as a matter of ideology, communicative practice, and social process. This particular sociolinguistic perspective has important implications for the way researchers collect, analyze, and interpret data. Informed by developments in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, sociolinguists have examined communicative practices within and across sites that can be ethnographically demonstrated to be linked. Working with the ideas of trajectories (of speakers, linguistic resources, discourses, institutions) across time and space and of discursive spaces which allow for, and also constrain, the production and circulation of discourses, sociolinguists have examined multilingual practices in a number of communities and argued that multilingual practices contribute to the construction of social boundaries and of the resources those boundaries regulate. They therefore also raise the question of the social and historical conditions that allow for the development of particular regimes of language, for their reproduction, their contestation, and, eventually, their modification or transformation. A further, closely related, area in which sociolinguists have extended the work by linguists and psycholinguists on bilingualism is that of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Building on earlier research on language socialization, which focused on young children acquiring their first language in culturally specific ways, they have examined bilingual and multilingual children’s developing competence in various speech and literacy events. Particular attention is given to the range of linguistic resources available, or not, in bilingual and multilingual communities and the ways in which children, as well as adolescents and adults, learn to choose among these resources for their symbolic value. The researchers emphasized language socialization as an interactive process, in which those being socialized also act as agents rather than as mere passive initiates. This line of inquiry also demonstrates how domains of knowledge are constructed through language and cultural practices, and how the individual’s positioning affects the process of knowledge acquisition and construction.
Conclusion Increased contacts with peoples speaking different languages as a result of globalization mean that bilingualism and multilingualism are becoming more commonplace a phenomenon for
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today’s world. People are more aware of the linguistic diversity around them. As the article shows, there is a considerable amount of knowledge related to bilingual and multilingual individuals, the manner in which they acquire languages, and the way they use them in daily life. Paradoxically, however, much of the research still uses the monolingual as the yardstick and often sees bilingualism as a deviation from the norm. Many issues also require further empirical research: for example, the organization of the bilingual brain; the structure and organization of the bilingual’s different languages; the various processing operations involved in the perception, production, and memorization of language when the speaker is using one or all his or her languages; and the linguistic and psycholinguistic differences and similarities between code-switching, borrowing, and interference. Advances in research technologies will clearly help the field to develop more sophisticated methods. Research findings will have impacts on policy and practice regarding the bilingual and multilingual individuals as well as the communities they form and live in.
Further Reading Bialystok E (2001) Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. De Houwer A (2009) Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Genesee F (1989) Early bilingual language development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language 16: 161–179. Krashen SD (1985) The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. New York: Longman. Krashen SD (2003) Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Kroll J and Stewart E (1984) Category interference in translation and picture naming. Journal of Memory and Language 33: 149–174. Lenneberg EH (1967) Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. Li W (2007) The Bilingualism Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Long MH (1981) Input interaction and second language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 379: 259–278. Meisel JM (1989) Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In: Hyltenstam K and Obler L (eds.) Bilingualism Across the Lifespan: Aspects of Acquisition, Maturity, and Loss, pp. 13–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter MC, So K-F, Von Echardt B, and Feldman LB (1984) Lexical and conceptual representation in beginning and more proficient bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 23: 23–38. Romaine S (1989/1995) Bilingualism, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Singleton D and Lengyel Z (1995) The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Swain M and Lapkin S (1995) Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step toward language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391. Volterra V and Taeschner T (1978) The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language 5: 311–326. Weinreich U (1953) Languages in Contact: Findings and problems. New York: The Linguistic Circle of New York; Reissued by Mouton in The Hague, 1968.