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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in a predominantly English‐speaking environment in the USA, both Spanish L1/English L2 and English L1/Spanish L2 bilinguals generally favored low attachment over high attachment irrespective of the language of the presented sentences, English or Spanish (Dussias, 2003). In other words, the Spanish sentences were analyzed according to the English‐like parsing strategy, demonstrating an accent in Spanish. In another study (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007), Spanish–English bilinguals immersed in L1 Spanish and presented with Spanish sentences behaved like the monolingual Spanish control subjects, favoring high attachment. In contrast, Spanish–English bilinguals presented with Spanish sentences but immersed in L2 English preferred the low attachment solution that is most common in English, thus showing a grammatical accent in L1. In short, bilinguals appear to prefer the parsing procedure that is most common in the language they are currently exposed to most. This in turn suggests that the two grammatical‐knowledge structures that enable the two different parses are activated to different degrees across different language contexts.

      Semantic Accents

      Languages differ from one another in the way their vocabularies carve up conceptual space and the physical world. For instance, both Russian and English have separate words for glasses and cups (stakany and chashki in Russian), but the exact reference of these words differs between these languages: Paper cups are called stakanchiki (small glasses) in Russian (Pavlenko, 2005). Variation in the expression of concepts across languages exists for many semantic domains, perhaps all, and it occurs across both distantly related and closely related languages (Majid, Jordan, & Dunn, 2015). One of the best‐known examples of differential word‐to‐concept mapping across languages concerns the semantic domain of color concepts. Languages vary widely in the number of color words they possess to describe the color spectrum and, of course, the number of color words used in a specific language has consequences for the exact reference of each of these words: The smaller the number of color words, the larger the range of hues referred to by each of them.

      The consequence of this cross‐language variability in color terminology for color categorization and representation in bilinguals has been examined since around 1960. One study concerned a detailed investigation of color naming in Navaho–English bilinguals and Navaho and English monolinguals (Ervin, 1961). Ervin first performed a detailed contrastive analysis of the color systems of Navaho and English. This analysis revealed, for instance, that litso, the closest Navaho translation of yellow, is the favored response of monolingual Navaho speakers to hues across a much larger part of the color spectrum than the range of hues exciting yellow in monolingual speakers of English. Assuming an influence from the colors' names in the nontarget language, Ervin expected the response probabilities in the target language to differ between the bilinguals and monolinguals. For instance, when presenting a yellowish color patch and inviting a color response in Navaho, the bilinguals were expected to produce fewer litso responses than the monolingual Navaho controls. These and other predictions from the contrastive analysis were borne out by the data.

      Bilingualism and Linguistic Relativity

      The above discussion on how languages differ in the way they map words onto concepts implicitly introduced the notion of “linguistic relativity,” that is, the idea that language influences thought or, more precisely, that differences between languages in the way they encode aspects of the surrounding world cause speakers of different languages to think differently about the world. The theory not only applies to nominal concepts such as color but also to grammatical concepts such as tense, number, and gender. For example, the fact that verb forms in English but not in Indonesian contain tense markers (information about the time of the event or action described by the verb: past, present, or future) is thought to result in different time cognition in speakers of English and Indonesian. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) is regarded as the major advocate of this view, which is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (after Whorf and his mentor Edward Sapir).

      Bilingual studies on linguistic relativity are still sparse, though their number is growing because of the awareness that bilingualism has the potential to critically inform the linguistic relativity debate. It may do so because “bilinguals are the only ones to experience directly the effects of linguistic relativity” (Pavlenko, 2005, p. 437). Do bilinguals experience different conceptual worlds when they speak their one or other language (a form of bilingualism that in the older literature is known as “coordinate bilingualism”)? If so, is each of these identical to the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of the languages concerned? In the case of sequential bilingualism (where L2 acquisition starts after L1 acquisition), are there intermediate states prior to an end state of experiencing two conceptual worlds and, if so, what are they? Or is it perhaps the case that bilinguals have developed a blended conceptual world shared by the two languages and different from the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of either language (known as “compound bilingualism”)?

      Bilingualism and Intelligence

      Until well beyond the middle of the 20th century the view prevailed that bilingualism is detrimental for intelligence and cognitive functioning in general. A study by Peal and Lambert (1962) marked a change from this view to the opinion that, under specific conditions, bilingualism is in fact beneficial for intelligence and cognition, including some aspects of linguistic competence. In that study 10‐year‐old French–English bilingual and French monolingual children from middle‐class French schools in Canada's Montreal region were administered a number of tests that measured their verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Whereas earlier studies had shown a disadvantage for bilingual children as compared with monolingual peers, the bilingual children in this study performed significantly better than the monolingual children on most tests, both the