Reference Page

Bialistok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Baker, C., & Jones, S. (1998). Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Darcy, N. T. (1953). A review of the literature on the effects of bilingualism upon the measurement of intelligence. The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology 82 (1): 21–57.

Gervain J., & Werker J.F. (2013). Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual.  Nature Communications, 1490. doi:10.1038/ncomms2430

Goswami, U. C. (2008). Cognitive development: the learning brain. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.

Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2009). The Bilingual Advantage In Novel Word Learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(4), 705-710.

Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2009). Bilingualism Reduces Native-language Interference During Novel-word Learning.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(3), 829-835.

Kaushanskaya, M., Blumenfeld, H., & Marian, V. (2011). The relationship between vocabulary and short-term memory measures in monolingual and bilingual speakers. International Journal of Blingualism, 15(4), 408-425.

Lee, Patrick. “Cognitive Development in Bilingual Children: A Case for Bilingual instruction in Early Childhood Education.” The Bilingual Research Journal 20.3 & 4 (1996): 499 – 522. Print.

Peal E., Lambert M. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs 75 (546): 1–23.

Pfister, J. M. (2009). A Contrast of Bilingual and Monolingual Children in regards to Semantic and Syntactic Language Acquisition. Butler University Libraries, 45. Retrieved April 29, 2013, from http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/45/

Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The Acquisition And Development Of Language By Bilingual Children. Journal Of Child Language, 5(02), 311-326.

Zatorre, R. (1989). On the representation of multiple languages in the brain: Old problems and new directions. Brain and Language, 36, 127-147.

Bilingual children and accents

This video is about a woman who expresses her thoughts about children who learn multiple languages when they are young. She believes because she learned a second language when she is an adult, that there is an accent when she speaks English. However, children who learn a second language when they are young, do not have an accent.

English Proficiency Score and Age of Arrival in U.S.

Sensitive period for second language acquisition. English language proficiency scores as a function of age of arrival in the United States for a group of Chinese and Korean adult immigrants (n = 46). All subjects were students or faculty at the University of Illinois and had been in the United States for at least 10 years before testing. The test measured a variety of grammatic judgments. Data are from Johnson and Newport (43).

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

Patricia Kuhl is a professor at the University of Washington. Her research primarily focuses on early language and brain development.

This video of Patricia Kuhl is very informative and interesting. She explains some of her findings on how early babies learn one language over another. In her studies she found that babies use “statistics” on sounds they hear. She also explain how she uses brain scans that examines babies’ brains.

There is a critical period on language acquisition of a new language. There is a picture of a graph in the video that shows that skill at acquiring a new language decrease consistently after the age of 7 years. The critical period or optimal period of learning a new language is before 7 years old. Anytime after that period language acquisition are usually significantly more difficult. This graph can be seen at 1:30 in the video. If parents want their children to be bilingual or multilingual it is best if they expose them to the languages at a younger age.

The first critical period in development is the period where babies master which sound is used in their language. For example, the English “l” and “r” sound is rarely used in Japanese. All babies from all over the world can discriminate all sounds of any language while adults can only discriminate only sounds of their own language and not of other language. Hence, Patricia Kuhl calls adults “culture bound listeners” while babies are “citizens of the world”. For this reason, it is more difficult for an adult to learn new language because they are only able to discriminate sounds of the language they already know.

A study on American and Japanese babies show that there is a critical 2 month period around 8 to 10 months babies. At 6-8 months both American and Japanese babies have similar score on performance on English sounds but when they are 10-12 months the American babies perform better and the Japanese babies perform worse. This graph can be seen at 3:10 in the video. Patricia Kuhl claims that babies are listening intently to sounds while taking “statistics” on the sounds of the language they hear. They will then use these statistics of sounds as a model to learn a language.

A follow up study shows that bilingual babies, who are exposed to 2 languages, keep 2 sets of statistics at once and can differentiate between them. The study tested Taiwanese and American babies on mandarin sounds and found similar results as in the previous study. They had similar score at 6-8 months but the Taiwanese babies perform better than American babies at 10-12 months. However when they had American babies exposed to mandarin they performed just as well as Taiwanese babies in the mandarin sound test at 10-12 months. This graph can be seen at 7:35 in the video. This proves that babies are learning sounds rapidly at this critical period. Parents should expose their children consistently to different languages at this critical period around 8-10 months so the children can learn languages at more ease.

In the end she introduces the magnetoencephalograph (MEG). It is a new machine that allows provides the ability to examine babies’ brains while they are learning. It is a safe, non-evasive and silent machine so it is ideal as using it to track a baby’s brain. This new technology opens up the possibility of future research direction for early language and brain development.

Angela Friederici- Studying Bilingualism

This is Angela Friderici, a German expert in neuropsychology and linguistics. She believes that for bilingualism, the processes of particular language aspects are in the same brain area. When there is a dominant language and a non-dominant language, the non-dominant language will have more activation than the dominant language. The more automatic you can speak or listen to a language the less activation is seen in the brain because it is easier. Even though the level of activation is different for a dominant and non-dominant language they are in the same area of the brain.

She then discusses the problem with studying bilingualism and solutions to certain problems. When it comes to bilingual research it is really hard to control the particular constraint during language acquisition. Sometimes a dominant language may change overtime. For example, when I was around 4 or 5 years old my dominant language was Chinese but by the time I was 8 years old my dominant language became English. To deal with this problem lab studies would need a complete record of how a subject learned a language. Afterward a possible way to control the learning phase of language acquisition is to use an artificial grammar or a language they never learned before. An artificial grammar can be design anyway but should have grammatical rule of an actual grammar. Then they would examine certain aspects such as particular phonological aspects that are relevant language learning.

Bilingual Babies can tell Languages Apart at 7 Months

Being a Chinese American I was a bilingual infant. My family speaks both Chinese and English. From as far as I can remember I was always able to differential between English and Chinese. I never unconsciously mix up the two languages or confused them with one another. I was always aware of which words are English and which one is in Chinese. I thought this was intrigued by how bilingual children are able to do this.

There is a new study done by Judit Gerain and Janet F. Werker in 2012 that claim 7 month old infants can distinguish different languages with different grammar apart by using prosody cues. Prosody cues which are duration and pitch of spoken words are used to figure out that languages are different.

In learning a new language for adults, the grammar is one of the hardest concepts to comprehend but infants are able to pick it up with ease. More amazingly, bilingual infants may have to learn the grammar of two very different languages with conflicting word order. For example, languages such as English, Italian and Spanish have the word order of the verb before the object while languages such as Japanese, Korean and Turkish have word order of object before the verb. A baby living in a bilingual household do not get confused by the conflicting grammar from the 2 different languages but are able to distinguish one from the other. It is fascinating how the brilliant mind of these infants can separate two languages apart on their own while I, a college student with years of education may have trouble distinguishing languages such as German and Russian apart.

In this study Gerain and Werker believes that infants uses these prosody cues to distinguish different languages. They examined and measured the pitch, tone, frequency and intensity of a variety of different languages and their grammar. They found that there is a difference between the object-verb prosody and verb-object prosody and bilingual infants can use prosody to identify the relevant word order in each of their two languages. They used the head turn preference method where measure the amount of time infants spend looking and listening to the test items. They tested on bilingual and monolingual infants.

The results suggest that bilingual infants who are exposed to object-verb and verb-object languages simultaneously are able to use prosodic information as cues. Their findings also suggest that by 7 months, bilingual infants use of prosody cues to learn languages are already well established. In conclusion, bilingual infants as young as 7 months old are able to distinguish different languages by using prosody cues.

Early Misconception on Bilingualism

Many early studies on bilingualism had conflicting results but the majority had a general conclusion that being bilingual had negative impact on a child’s linguistic and cognitive development and are at a disadvantage to monolinguals.  The belief was learning two different languages would confuse bilingual children which in turn would lower the intelligence.  Bilingual children would be spending more energy at differentiating between the two languages. Their vocabulary would be smaller because they have to learn two sets of vocabulary instead of focusing on just one.  However, these early studies were flawed.  These old poorly designed studies gave the public misconception that bilinguals had lower intelligence than monolinguals.

A study on bilingualism found that bilinguals perform worse in IQ test compare to monolinguals. (Darcy, 1953)  This study claim that bilinguals had smaller vocabularies and had issues on language development based on the verbal section of the IQ test.  One major problem is that the IQ test is culturally bias and is English orientated.  

Like many other flawed studies, they did not take into account many factors. For example most bilingual children were recent immigrants with weaker English skills and are in different social economical status compared to monolingual participants. Furthermore, bilinguals are often assessed in one language usually in English if tested in the United States which provides an inaccurate assessment of linguistic skill if English is not the dominate language. Many older studies did not have a set criterion on the definition of bilingualism. They may consider a immigrant who just came to American and just started to learned English as a bilingual child.

The flaws in these early studies were brought to light by Peal and Lambert (1962) which emphasizes the importance of controlling factors such as age, sex, social economical status and standardize criterion on what is bilingualism while selecting samples for studies.  In their study, they found that bilinguals showed significant advantages over monolingual in verbal and non-verbal test.  There was even more significant difference in the non-verbal test which required more mental flexibility.

Afterward, there were more recent studies with more careful controls for factors were finding that bilingualism had an advantage to monolinguals in certain aspects of cognitive functions.Studies suggests that bilingual children have increased meta-cognitive skills and better at divergent thinking. In addition, bilingual children are shown to better at perceptual tasks than their monolingual counterparts.(Bialystock, 2001)

There are still some few studies that still find bilinguals at a disadvantage but the majority of the newer studies are  leaning towards that bilinguals have the advantage over monolinguals.
For example, a study by Umbel and Oller (1993) found that bilingualism is associated with delays in lexical acquisition with small vocabularies. However, a well controlled study by Baker and Jones (1998) found that there was no significant difference in verbal ability between monolingual and bilingual middle school children. The general opinion nowadays on bilingualism is that is does more good than harm.

Bilingual Brain

There has been studies on how language is organized in the “bilingual brain” and how this organization differs from that of the monolingual.  Language processing usually occurs mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain or in both hemispheres. Based on some early case studies and experiments of bilingual some researchers believed that bilinguals use the right hemisphere in language processing more than monolinguals. However, more recent and better controlled studies found clear evidence that monolinguals and bilinguals do not differ at all in hemispheric involvement during language processing. (Zatorre, 1989)

From most experiments, researchers believe that the bilingual languages are not stored in completely different locations. Monolingual and bilingual use similar neural region for language processing. In addition, there are research that found that bilinguals have two subsets of neural connections, one for each language . Each can be activated or inhibited independently. (Paradis, 1989).

The brain consist of white matter and grey matter. Grey matter is the major component of the brain that consist of cell bodies, dendrites and synapses.  The gray matter is mostly found on the surface around the brain but also inside such as the thalamus, hypothalamus and cerebrum. The white matter consist of glial cells and myelinated axon and it mainly serves as transmitting nerve signals.  White matter serves like a supporting role for the grey matter of the brain.  A recent study found that earlier bilingual speaker had a higher density of grey matter in the left inferior parietal cortex than monolingual speakers (Mechelli et al., 2004) The left inferior parietal cortex is concerned with language and mathematical operations.

This video explains how an experiment found a switch in the brain for changing between two languages.  There was a increase in activity in the left caudate which is a specific region in the brain when speakers shifted from one language to the other.  This would explain why bilinguals with damaged left caudates involuntarily switch languages when speaking.

There is still many unknown about the bilingual brain and many future research are still required.

Word Learning

Word learning is a good way to index language ability in bilinguals because these tasks show a child’s general ability to process linguistic information but do not rely on existing linguistic knowledge (Peña et al., 2001). This means that people who are bilingual should perform just as well on word-learning tasks as monolinguals and better than bilinguals who experience language deficits even though they have poor language knowledge due to low proficiency. However, there are very little known facts about how bilingual people learn words. Recent studies have been conducted to compare bilingual and monolingual adults on their ability to learn new words. Findings that were found were that people who are bilingual that were tested in their native language outperformed monolingual adults on word-learning tasks.

 

An example of this is the Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009) which examined the effects of cross-linguistic inconsistencies between bilingual and monolingual adults and found that native-language orthographic information that was presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals, but not in bilinguals. This shows that bilinguals may be shielded from native-language interference during novel word-learning. 24 English-Spanish bilinguals and 24 English-speaking monolinguals from Northwestern University students that were comparable in age and education levels were used as participants in this study. Both these bilingual and monolingual participants underwent vocabulary learning and testing. The results were as follows. English-Spanish bilinguals revealed higher accuracy rates than in monolinguals. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all performance measures pertaining to words learned bimodally. For words that were learned unimodally, bilinguals also outperformed monolinguals during immediate testing but not during delayed testing. An additional information that they found were that bilingual participants were more accurate than monolingual participants at recognizing visually presented novel words which indicated that bilingual participants were paying attention to the visual forms of the novel words during the hearing-and-seeing learning phase.

 

To continue this further, Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009) did another study on whether bilingualism facilitates examined word-learning performance in adults. This study involved 20 English-Mandarin bilinguals, 20 English-Spanish bilinguals, and 20 monolingual speakers all comparable in their age, education and English as their native language. All 3 groups also underwent vocabulary learning and testing and found that English-Spanish bilinguals and English-Mandarin bilinguals demonstrated more accuracy rates than monolinguals. The analysis and figure below also reveals that participants perform more accurately during immediate testing than during delayed testing. Both bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group on both immediate and delayed tests. This shows that bilingual children can acquire new words efficiently under and learning conditions and may be less contingent on latent vocabulary knowledge than in monolingual children.

          Furthermore, another study to prove that bilingual speakers outperform monolingual speakers was the Kaushanskaya, Blumenfeld, and Marian (2011). Their objective was to find out the performance of bilingual speakers on standardized tests of vocabulary knowledge in English (their native language) and the relationship between phonological short-term memory and vocabulary knowledge in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The results for experiment 1 were that there was similar performance on the PPVT-III (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III) test as well as performance on digit-span between monolinguals and bilinguals. These comparisons indicate that bilingualism did not reduce the level of dominant-language vocabulary and short-term memory performance found in monolinguals. However, another result that Kaushanskaya, Blumenfeld, and Marian (2011) found was that monolingual English speakers digit-span scores did not correlate with the PPVT-III but bilingual English-Spanish speakers correlated strongly and positively.

Lexical Organization

When children first learn a language, a noticeable change takes place in the salience of various word-word relations during middle childhood. A child has difficulty attributing the relationship between planes and buses to their shared taxonomy but is quick to point out the thematic relationship between an iron and a shirt. Children might unable to be able to recognize that both plane and bus are vehicles but realize that they both exhaust fumes. Most children already acknowledge both thematic and taxonomic relationships by the time they are 8 years old.  (Hashimoto et al., 2007). Children who are bilingual must store and retrieve a lot of words whether it is simultaneously or sequentially because vocabularies are distributed across two linguistic systems.

In a study done by Sheng, McGregor, and Marian (2006) with Mandarin-English bilingual children and monolingual children, they found that bilingual children responded more frequently taxonomically than the monolingual children when the first associations and associations to verbs were compared. This finding is interesting because bilingual children have a significantly smaller English receptive vocabulary than monolinguals but they have subtle advantage.

Volterra and Taeschner (2008) analyzed how children become bilingual from a three stage gradual learning process. The first stage is that the child has one lexical system which includes words from both of the languages. The second stage is that the child distinguishes the two different lexicons but can apply the same syntactic rules to both languages. The third stage is that the child has two linguistic codes, differentiated both in syntax and lexicon, but each language is exclusively associated with the person using that language. Once they complete all three stages, and are able to categorize people in terms of their language decreases and become bilingual.

Additionally, a study by Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2008) compared word association between Spanish-English bilingual children in their first and second languages. There was also a subtle Spanish advantage over English speakers in generating taxonomic associations to adjectives and verbs. Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2008) believe that because the Spanish language uses many verbs such as (-oso, -ado, -ivo) to mark the adjective class and use or verbs, that the utterances may have led to an earlier appreciation of taxonomic relations for Spanish adjectives and verbs.

Pfister (2009) interested in education systems questions whether or not teaching children a second language as well as English is a good idea or bad. Pfister accomplished this study by conducting an online survey for a month which asked bilingual individuals their opinions and reflections on their own bilingual acquisition and their children’s. She found that bilingual children will follow a series of stages in their semantic and syntactic acquisition in which there is a bilingual disadvantage, followed by a bilingual advantage and a continuous stage of neutrality between bilingual children and their monolingual peers. Children and Adults who are bilingual have a unique configuration of languages in comparison to monolinguals.

In another study by Gauthier (2012) and (Houwer, 1999, p.2), concluded that exposing infants to two different languages at birth will not cause them to acquire language differently than their monolingual peers. Overall, monolingual and bilingual children acquire language in the same way.