The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Carol A. Chapelle

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Название The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics
Автор произведения Carol A. Chapelle
Жанр Языкознание
Серия
Издательство Языкознание
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119147374



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the frequent use of two languages produces a specific linguistic competence, one that differs from the competence of monolingual speaker–listeners but that is by no means inferior to it.

      Most studies on language interaction (also called “crosslinguistic influence” or “transfer”) in bilinguals have looked at the influence of the native, first language (L1) on using the second (L2), ignoring the possibility that L2 may also influence L1. Laufer (2003) suggests one reason is that many researchers in applied linguistics have been especially interested in L2 learning, and particularly in its earliest stages. Crosslinguistic influences during these early stages of learning are almost entirely from the stronger L1 to the still weak L2 rather than from L2 to L1. A second reason she suggests is that much work on L2 learning has been motivated by the question of how members of immigrant communities can come to master the dominant language of the host community, the immigrants' L2, as rapidly as possible. Consequently, research primarily focused on how L2 was acquired rather than on what happened to L1 in the process. Whatever the reasons for the relative lack of studies examining an influence of L2 on L1, the available evidence indicates that such influence exists in all linguistic domains: phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, conceptual representation, and pragmatics (Pavlenko, 2000).

      Language interaction in bilinguals is manifest in multiple phenomena. Among them are accented speech and accented comprehension, that is, the production of particular linguistic elements that differ from the way monolingual speakers would produce them, and differences in language comprehension processes as compared with monolinguals listening to or reading analogous language input. The word “accent” is used in a broad sense here, referring to differences in both language production and language comprehension in bilinguals as compared with monolinguals, and to differences in all linguistic subdomains, not just phonology.

      One possible source of accents is parallel activation of representations of linguistic elements in bilinguals' two language subsystems, even when they have selected one of their languages (the “target” language) for current use. Because the language system of monolinguals only stores linguistic units belonging to a single language, such parallel activation does not occur when monolinguals process language. According to this view, the representation units themselves do not need to differ between monolinguals and bilinguals. For instance, the representation of the English phoneme /t/ and the stored meaning for English cat in an English–French bilingual are identical to the representation of English /t/ and the stored meaning of English cat in a monolingual English speaker. The second possible source of bilingual speech accents is that bilinguals may have developed memory representations of specific linguistic units that differ from the representations of the corresponding units in monolingual memory. For instance, bilinguals may have developed representations that merge a pair of corresponding representations in monolingual speakers of their two languages. The former source of accents may be regarded a difference in processing or “performance”; the latter a difference in knowledge or “competence.”

      Phonological Accents

      Flege (2002) attributed these phonological accents to two L2 speech learning processes. One of these, “phonetic category assimilation,” is thought to lead to representations that merge closely similar L1 and L2 sounds into a single phonetic category in memory. The second, “phonetic category dissimilation,” is thought to operate when an L2 sound is very different from all L1 sounds stored in memory. A separate representation for the new L2 sound is then formed in memory, but the position it takes up in phonetic space differs from the position occupied by this sound in monolingual speakers of the language concerned. Furthermore, while inserting a phonetic category for this new sound into the phonetic space, it pushes away one or more of the categories that represent L1 sounds from their original positions (causing an accent).

      Though category assimilation and dissimilation provide a plausible explanation of the phonological accents in bilingual speech production, an account in terms of parallel activation of two analogous L1/L2 phonetic categories (e.g., a French‐like /t/ and an English‐like /t/) appears equally plausible, at least for both early bilinguals and late proficient bilinguals. Early bilinguals can already perceive the difference between certain pairs of closely similar L1 and L2 phonetic categories from 10 to 11 months onward (e.g., Sundara, Polka, & Molnar, 2008) and late proficient bilinguals can also do this (Flege, 2007). This discrimination ability clearly points toward the existence of separate phonetic representations for similar L1/L2 sounds because it is hard to see how a difference between two such speech sounds can be perceived at all if they share one and the same representation. The very existence of such pairs of representations for speech sounds that are similar in L1 and L2 renders an interpretation of accented speech sounds in terms of their parallel activation plausible (see De Groot, 2014).

      Grammatical Accents

      Dussias and her colleagues examined how Spanish–English bilinguals parse sentences of the second type. The results suggested an influence of the other language on the way bilinguals analyze them and that the context