Bilingual Development

Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency

by Kenneth Keng Wee Ong

Published in Language and Education, Nov 2011 forthcoming, Volume 26, Issue 3, 2012. Access the paper at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09500782.2011.629026

Development of lexical richness in Turkish written texts of bilingual adolescents in Germany

by Seda Yilmaz

Bilingual beginnings as a lens for theory development: PRIMIR in focus

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Curtin, S.A., Werker, J.F., & Byers-Heinlein, K. (in press, 2011). Journal of    Phonetics. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2010.12.002

PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations; Curtin & Werker, 2007;... more PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations; Curtin & Werker, 2007; Werker & Curtin, 2005) is a framework that encompasses the bidirectional relations between infant speech perception and the emergence of the lexicon. Here, we expand its mandate by considering infants growing up bilingual. We argue that, just like monolinguals, bilingual infants have access to rich information in the speech stream and by the end of their first year, they establish not only language-specific phonetic category representations, but also encode and represent both sub-phonetic and indexical detail. Perceptual biases, developmental level, and task demands work together to influence the level of detail used in any particular situation. In considering bilingual acquisition, we more fully elucidate what is meant by task demands, now understood both in terms of external demands imposed by the language situation, and internal demands imposed by the infant (e.g. different approaches to the same apparent task taken by infants from different backgrounds). In addition to the statistical learning mechanism previously described in PRIMIR, the necessity of a comparison–contrast mechanism is discussed. This refocusing of PRIMIR in the light of bilinguals more fully explicates the relationship between speech perception and word learning in all infants.
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The roots of bilingualism in newborns

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Byers-Heinlein, K., Burns, T.F., & Werker, J.F. (2010).  Psychological Science, 21(3), 343-348. doi: 10.1177/0956797609360758

The first steps toward bilingual language acquisition have already begun at birth. When tested on their preference for... more The first steps toward bilingual language acquisition have already begun at birth. When tested on their preference for English versus Tagalog, newborns whose mothers spoke only English during pregnancy showed a robust preference for English. In contrast, newborns whose mothers spoke both English and Tagalog regularly during pregnancy showed equal preference for both languages. A group of newborns whose mothers had spoken both Chinese and English showed an intermediate pattern of preference for Tagalog over English. Preference for two languages does not suggest confusion between them, however. Study 2 showed that both English monolingual newborns and Tagalog-English bilingual newborns could discriminate English from Tagalog. The same perceptual and learning mechanisms that support acquisition in a monolingual environment thus also naturally support bilingual acquisition.

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Werker, J. F., Byers-Heinlein, K., & Fennell, C. T. (2009). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 3649-3663. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0105

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether... more At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.
Keywords: bilingualism; language development; infancy;

Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: Infants’ language experience influences the development of a word learning heuristic

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J.F. (2009). Developmental Science, 12(5), 815-823. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00902.x

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants... more How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence.

Using speech sounds to guide word learning: The case of bilingual infants

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Fennell, C.T., Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J.F. (2007). Child Development, 78, 1510-1525. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01080.x

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals... more Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., ‘‘bih’’ and ‘‘dih’’) in a laboratory task until 17 months of age (J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old bilingual infants: a heterogeneous sample (English and another language; N 5 48) and two homogeneous samples (28 English – Chinese and 25 English – French infants). In all samples, bilinguals did not learn similar-sounding words until 20 months, indicating that they use relevant language sounds (i.e., consonants) to direct word learning developmentally later than monolinguals, possibly due to the increased cognitive load of learning two languages. However, this developmental pattern may be adaptive for bilingual word learning.

Bilingualism in infancy: First steps in perception and comprehension

by Krista Byers-Heinlein

Werker, J.F., & Byers-Heinlein, K. (2008). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 144-151. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.01.008

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view... more Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

Metalinguistic Filters Within the Bilingual Language Faculty: A Study of Young English-Chinese Bilinguals

by Kenneth Keng Wee Ong

Published in Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2010, 39(3), 243-272, June 2010. Please access the paper at http://www.springerlink.com/content/y7365t454r5pn08w/

This study reports two metalinguistic parameters that constitute the schematic control of lateral inhibitory links... more This study reports two metalinguistic parameters that constitute the schematic control of lateral inhibitory links between translation equivalents within the bilingual lexico-semantic system of Green’s (1998a, 1998b, 2007) inhibitory control (IC) model. Building on Green’s postulation that the bilingual lexico-semantic system is controlled by a hierarchy of schemas under a supervisory attentional system, the bilingual unconsciously filters activated lemmas during fluent spontaneous codeswitching, such that lemmas that are semantico-syntactically versatile or morphosyntactically transparent are likely to reach a threshold of activation first while other lemmas are inhibited. To investigate the issue, we collected code-paired naturalistic and elicited data with a focus on code-switched determiner phrases from 140 Mandarin-English simultaneous bilinguals who were post-secondary students in Singapore. We found that the semanticosyntactic and morpho-syntactic dissimilarities between Mandarin and English activated both filters. As most Mandarin determiners are economical vis-à-vis their English counterparts, their lemmas were selected frequently while English lemmas were largely inhibited. It was also found that our participants preferred English nouns in filling the lexical category for their interpretable feature of number, a feature that is normally absent in Mandarin nouns.

Exploring Bilingualism In a Monolingual School System: Insights From Turkish and Native Students From Belgian Schools

by Orhan Agirdag

Published in British Journal of Sociology of Education

A growing body of empirical studies indicates the educational benefits of bilingualism. Despite this tendency,... more A growing body of empirical studies indicates the educational benefits of bilingualism. Despite this tendency, bilingual minority students are being pressured by school authorities to shed their mother tongues. We conducted qualitative interviews with Turkish-bilingual and native-monolingual students in Flemish (Belgium) secondary schools to investigate how students evaluate their languages, how Dutch monolingualism is imposed, and how students respond to the dominance of monolingualism. Our results indicate that the mother tongues of bilingual students are mainly perceived as a barrier to educational and occupational success, while the benefits of bilingualism are unknown. Thus, both Turkish-bilingual and native-monolingual students approved of speaking one language. We also found that monolingualism was strongly imposed on students by explicit encouragement, formal punishment when bilinguals speak their mother tongue, and exclusion of foreign languages from the cultural repertoire of the school. These results are discussed as they relate to policy-makers, scholars of bilingualism and institutional racism.