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Rising to the bilingual challenge: self-reported experiences of managing life with two languages
Abstract
A recent surge of findings on bilingual cognitive advantage has attracted attention from both researchers and the media. An advantage has been demonstrated with regard to, inter alia, inhibiting, switching, monitoring and updating. However, Paap et al. argue that the advantage does not exist or is only limited to executive functioning. Both sides of the debate are well grounded in research. Nevertheless, what seems to be missing from the current discussion is the voice of bilingual speakers, that is , how they manage life with two languages and if they perceive any cognitive, social or economic advantages or indeed, disadvantages of knowing two languages more than one language. Here, I report on an extensive questionnaire in which German–English participants reflected upon their use of languages and the particular benefits as well as the challenges they face. Constructs, such as inhibition, retrieval of words language mixing were explored. It has been elicited that all participants considered knowledge of two languages to be highly advantageous despite encountering occasional problems in the form of: tip of the tongue states, code switching or relying on literal translation. In general, all participants agreed that the positive aspects of being bilingual greatly outweigh the negatives.
... Finally, we can begin to model aspects of the day-to-day problems that come with being multilingual, such as language intrusion: unintentionally using a different language from the one intended (cf. Tytus, 2018;Jarema, 2017). ...
This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual vocabulary, with English as L1, German or Mandarin as L2, and Mandarin or Dutch as L3. Our simulations reveal that when qualitative differences emerge between the learning of a first, second, and third language, these differences emerge from distributional properties of the particular languages involved rather than the order of acquisition per se, or any difference in learning mechanism. One such property is the number of homophones in each language, since within‐language homophones give rise to errors in production. Our simulations also show the importance of suprasegmental information in determining the kinds of production errors made.
... According to a report entitled 'Europeans and their Languages ' Eurobarometer (2012) written on behalf of the European Commission about 28% of European citizens are trilingual and 11% speak more than three foreign languages. Furthermore, in a recent extensive language questionnaire on the bilingual perception of the benefits and challenges associated with bilingualism, Tytus (2016) demonstrated that a quarter of the 92 respondents that were questioned at a German university had knowledge of two foreign languages and an additional half of the total spoke three languages in addition to their native German. English language was found to be the most popular L2, French and Spanish were listed as the most popular L3s, whereas, the L4s varied including: Chinese, Italian, and Norwegian. ...
The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in J Mem Lang 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in J Mem Lang 51(1), 1-22, 2004) skillfully capture the prediction regarding two languages, with the lexical level being separate and the conceptual one being unified or distributed to a varying degree. In this set of experiments, we employed primed animacy decision tasks to address the lexico-semantic representation of trilingual German-English-French speakers. The comparison of reaction times has revealed priming effects from L1 to L2 and from L2 to L1, both with prime duration of 100 and 50 ms; a priming asymmetry effect between the L2 and L3 language directions; and no interaction between L1 and L3. The aggregated findings point to a hybrid representation, with both compound and coordinate representations being possible.
The present article focuses on data collection through web questionnaires, as opposed to the traditional pen-and-paper method for research in second language acquisition and bilingualism. It is argued that web questionnaires, which have been used quite widely in psychology, have the advantage of reaching out to a larger and more diverse pool of potential participants, which may increase the ecological validity of the resulting database. After considering some issues raised in debates on the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches to data collection through questionnaires as opposed to web-based questionnaires, we present two case studies of research designs based on online questionnaires, that is, the bilingualism and emotions questionnaire (Dewaele and Pavlenko, 2001/03) and the feelings questionnaire (Wilson, 2008). We reflect on the issue of participant self-selection and conclude that the potential benefits of web-based questionnaires can outweigh their limitations.
The hypothesis that managing two languages enhances general executive functioning is examined. More than 80% of the tests for bilingual advantages conducted after 2011 yield null results and those resulting in significant bilingual advantages tend to have small sample sizes. Some published studies reporting significant bilingual advantages arguably produce no group differences if more appropriate tests of the critical interaction or more appropriate baselines are used. Some positive findings are likely to have been caused by failures to match on demographic factors and others have yielded significant differences only with a questionable use of the analysis-of-covariance to "control" for these factors. Although direct replications are under-utilized, when they are, the results of seminal studies cannot be reproduced. Furthermore, most studies testing for bilingual advantages use measures and tasks that do not have demonstrated convergent validity and any significant differences in performance may reflect task-specific mechanism and not domain-free executive functions (EF) abilities. Brain imaging studies have made only a modest contribution to evaluating the bilingual-advantage hypothesis, principally because the neural differences do not align with the behavioral differences and also because the neural measures are often ambiguous with respect to whether greater magnitudes should cause increases or decreases in performance. The cumulative effect of confirmation biases and common research practices has either created a belief in a phenomenon that does not exist or has inflated the frequency and effect size of a genuine phenomenon that is likely to emerge only infrequently and in restricted and undetermined circumstances.
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Recent research in cognitive effects of bilingualism has generated both excitement and controversy. The current paper provides an overview of this literature that has taken a componential approach toward cognitive effects of bilingualism, according to which bilingual advantages in executive functions are measured in terms of executive control (inhibiting, switching, updating) and monitoring. Findings to date indicate that the presence or absence of bilingual advantages may be influenced by a variety of learner and environmental factors, including the bilingual individual's age, age of acquisition, language proficiency, frequency of language use, and difficulty of the experimental task. The cognitive effects of bilingualism must be interpreted in light of the bilingual's lifelong linguistic experience, which results in adaptive changes in the mind and the brain. We suggest directions for future research in this domain.
It is a widely held belief that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in executive-control tasks, but is this what all studies actually demonstrate? The idea of a bilingual advantage may result from a publication bias favoring studies with positive results over studies with null or negative effects. To test this hypothesis, we looked at conference abstracts from 1999 to 2012 on the topic of bilingualism and executive control. We then determined which of the studies they reported were subsequently published. Studies with results fully supporting the bilingual-advantage theory were most likely to be published, followed by studies with mixed results. Studies challenging the bilingual advantage were published the least. This discrepancy was not due to differences in sample size, tests used, or statistical power. A test for funnel-plot asymmetry provided further evidence for the existence of a publication bias.
© The Author(s) 2014.
This study utilizing a group of monolingual and a group of bilingual 10-year old children obtained from 6 Montreal French schools were given verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests as well as measures of attitudes to the English and French communities. It is interesting to note that this study contrary to others found that bilinguals performed significantly better than their monolingual controls both on the verbal and the nonverbal intelligence tests. Factor analysis supported the hypothesis that the structures of intellect for the 2 groups differed with the bilingual group possessing a more diversified set of mental abilities. Attitude studies also appear to give the bilinguals a more favorable attitude, than their monolingual comparable peers, toward the English-Canadians and less toward the French-Canadians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the relation between the cognitive style construct of field dependence–independence (FDI) and 2 processing components. These components, control of linguistic processing and analysis of knowledge, have been identified in previous research as part of metalinguistic ability. Children between the ages of 7 and 9 years were given a number of metalinguistic tasks and 2 measures of FDI. The results showed a common basis for FDI and metalinguistic problems requiring high levels of control but not for FDI and metalinguistic problems requiring high levels of analysis. These results shed light on the underlying cognitive basis of metalinguistic performance and established the role for 1 of the 2 processing components across domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Speakers who routinely use more than one language may not use any of their languages in ways which are exactly like that of a monolingual speaker. In sequential bilingualism, for example, there is often evidence of interference from the L1 in the L2 system. Describing these interference phenomena and accounting for them on the basis of theoretical models of linguistic knowledge has long been a focus of interest of Applied Linguistics. More recently, research has started to investigate linguistic traffic which goes the other way: L2 interferences and contact phenomena evident in the L1. Such phenomena are probably experienced to some extent by all bilinguals. They are, however, most evident among speakers for whom a language other than the L1 has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life (Schmid and Köpke, 2007). This is the case for migrants who move to a country where a language is spoken which, for them, is a second or foreign language. We refer to the phenomena of L1 change and L2 interference which can be observed in such situations as language attrition.
Bilingual speech requires that the language of utterances be selected prior to articulation. Past research has debated whether the language of speaking can be determined in advance of speech planning and, if not, the level at which it is eventually selected. We argue that the reason that it has been difficult to come to an agreement about language selection is that there is not a single locus of selection. Rather, language selection depends on a set of factors that vary according to the experience of the bilinguals, the demands of the production task, and the degree of activity of the nontarget language. We demonstrate that it is possible to identify some conditions that restrict speech planning to one language alone and others that open the process to cross-language influences. We conclude that the presence of language nonselectivity at all levels of planning spoken utterances renders the system itself fundamentally nonselective.
Much of the research on delaying the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has focused on pharmacotherapy, but environmental factors have also been acknowledged to play a significant role. Bilingualism may be one factor contributing to 'cognitive reserve' (CR) and therefore to a delay in symptom onset. If bilingualism is protective, then the brains of bilinguals should show greater atrophy in relevant areas, since their enhanced CR enables them to function at a higher level than would be predicted from their level of disease. We analyzed a number of linear measurements of brain atrophy from the computed tomography (CT) scans of monolingual and bilingual patients diagnosed with probable AD who were matched on level of cognitive performance and years of education. Bilingual patients with AD exhibited substantially greater amounts of brain atrophy than monolingual patients in areas traditionally used to distinguish AD patients from healthy controls, specifically, the radial width of the temporal horn and the temporal horn ratio. Other measures of brain atrophy were comparable for the two groups. Bilingualism appears to contribute to increased CR, thereby delaying the onset of AD and requiring the presence of greater amounts of neuropathology before the disease is manifest.
The rapid growth of the Internet provides a wealth of new research opportunities for psychologists. Internet data collection methods, with a focus on self-report questionnaires from self-selected samples, are evaluated and compared with traditional paper-and-pencil methods. Six preconceptions about Internet samples and data quality are evaluated by comparing a new large Internet sample (N = 361,703) with a set of 510 published traditional samples. Internet samples are shown to be relatively diverse with respect to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presentation formats, are not adversely affected by nonserious or repeat responders, and are consistent with findings from traditional methods. It is concluded that Internet methods can contribute to many areas of psychology.
Bilinguals named pictures in their dominant language more slowly (and with more errors) than did monolinguals. In contrast, bilinguals named the same pictures as quickly as did monolinguals on the fifth presentation (in Experiment 2) and classified them (as human made or natural) as quickly and accurately as did monolinguals (in Experiment 1). In addition, bilinguals retrieved English picture names more quickly if they knew the name in both Spanish and English (on the basis of a translation test that bilinguals completed after the timed tasks), and monolingual response times for the same materials suggested that this finding was not obtained simply because names that were easier to translate were easier in general. These findings suggest that bilinguals differ from monolinguals at a postconceptual processing level, that implicit activation of lexical representations in the nontarget language can facilitate retrieval in the target language, and that being bilingual is analogous to having a lexicon full of lower frequency words, relative to monolinguals.
Limited to one definition of bilingualism, namely, dual-language acquisition, in a one-person, one-language home environment, experiments were designed to test Leopold's observations on the earlier separation of word sound from word meaning by bilingual compared to matched unilingual children. Attention to meaning or to sound of words was tested with the semantic and phonetic preference test, a two-choice test in which similarity between words could be interpreted on the basis of shared meaning or shared acoustic properties. The notion that bilingualism leads to the earlier realization of the arbitrary nature of name-object relationship was tested with the questioning technique described by Vygotsky. This called for the explanation of names, whether names can be interchanged and, when names are interchanged in play, whether the attributes of the objects change along with their names. The results support Leopold's observation on the earlier separation of sound and meaning by bilingual children.
Meuter and Allport (1999) were among the first to implicate an inhibitory mechanism in bilingual language control. In their study, bilinguals took longer to name a number in the L1 directly following an L2 naming trial than to name a number in the L2 following an L1 naming trial, suggesting that bilinguals suppress the more dominant L1 during L2 production. Since then, asymmetric switch costs have not been replicated in all subsequent studies, and some have questioned whether switch costs necessarily reveal language inhibition. Based on methodological grounds and interpretability problems, we conclude that switch costs may not be the most reliable index of inhibition in bilingual language control. We review alternative proposals for the source of switch costs, and point to other indices of inhibition within the switching paradigm and from adapted paradigms.
Contemporary research on bilingualism has been framed by two major discoveries. In the realm of language processing, studies of comprehension and production show that bilinguals activate information about both languages when using one language alone. Parallel activation of the two languages has been demonstrated for highly proficient bilinguals as well as second language learners and appears to be present even when distinct properties of the languages themselves might be sufficient to bias attention towards the language in use. In the realm of cognitive processing, studies of executive function have demonstrated a bilingual advantage, with bilinguals outperforming their monolingual counterparts on tasks that require ignoring irrelevant information, task switching, and resolving conflict. Our claim is that these outcomes are related and have the overall effect of changing the way that both cognitive and linguistic processing are carried out for bilinguals. In this article we consider each of these domains of bilingual performance and consider the kinds of evidence needed to support this view. We argue that the tendency to consider bilingualism as a unitary phenomenon explained in terms of simple component processes has created a set of apparent controversies that masks the richness of the central finding in this work: the adult mind and brain are open to experience in ways that create profound consequences for both language and cognition.
100 Spanish(L1)-English(L2) bilingual children attending kindergarten and first grade bilingual education programs were tested at 2 points in time, 6 months apart. Children in the sample (ages 5-7 years) represented extreme groups of high and low second-language proficiency. At each time of testing, children's proficiency in Spanish and English was assessed and a battery of cognitive tasks measuring visual and verbal abilities was administered. The findings indicate that observed cognitive differences between second-language-proficiency groups can be attributed to group differences in socioeconomic variables. The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive abilities was positive and rather strong for children of low second-language proficiency. This pattern of results questioned the validity of Cummins's threshold hypothesis and suggested a new, alternative hypothesis-namely, that degree of bilingualism is related to variability in cognitive measures only before a certain threshold of proficiency in the second language is attained. In addition, 2 sets of statistical analyses on the longitudinal data gave support to a cause-effect model in which degree of bilingualism appears as the causal factor affecting children's cognitive abilities.
Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways. We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace.
In general, people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager—indeed, at times, other people's predictions of a person's outcomes prove more accurate than that person's self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are “above average” in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), overestimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments.
Research focusing on health echoes these findings. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own health risks compared with those of other people. They also overestimate how distinctive their opinions and preferences (e.g., discomfort with alcohol) are among their peers—a misperception that can have a deleterious impact on their health. Unable to anticipate how they would respond to emotion-laden situations, they mispredict the preferences of patients when asked to step in and make treatment decisions for them. Guided by mistaken but seemingly plausible theories of health and disease, people misdiagnose themselves—a phenomenon that can have severe consequences for their health and longevity.
Similarly, research in education finds that students' assessments of their performance tend to agree only moderately with those of their teachers and mentors. Students seem largely unable to assess how well or poorly they have comprehended material they have just read. They also tend to be overconfident in newly learned skills, at times because the common educational practice of massed training appears to promote rapid acquisition of skill—as well as self-confidence—but not necessarily the retention of skill. Several interventions, however, can be introduced to prompt students to evaluate their skill and learning more accurately.
In the workplace, flawed self-assessments arise all the way up the corporate ladder. Employees tend to overestimate their skill, making it difficult to give meaningful feedback. CEOs also display overconfidence in their judgments, particularly when stepping into new markets or novel projects—for example, proposing acquisitions that hurt, rather then help, the price of their company's stock. We discuss several interventions aimed at circumventing the consequences of such flawed assessments; these include training people to routinely make cognitive repairs correcting for biased self-assessments and requiring people to justify their decisions in front of their peers.
The act of self-assessment is an intrinsically difficult task, and we enumerate several obstacles that prevent people from reaching truthful self-impressions. We also propose that researchers and practitioners should recognize self-assessment as a coherent and unified area of study spanning many subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and other people who makes real-world assessments should be wary of self-assessments of skill, expertise, and knowledge, and should consider ways of repairing self-assessments that may be flawed.
An attempt is made in the present paper to resolve inconsistencies between the results of recent studies which have reported that bilingualism is associated with positive cognitive consequences and earlier studies which suggested that bilingualism might adversely affect cognitive and scholastic progress. Because recent studies involved balanced bilinguals and were carried out in "additive" bilingual settings, the bilingual subjects in these studies are likely to have attained a high level of competence in the second language (L2) at no cost to their level of competence in the first language (L1). However, earlier studies tended to involve bilingual subjects from language minority groups whose L1 was gradually being replaced by their L2. Thus, it is not surprising that many of these earlier studies produced evidence of a "balance effect," i.e., that a bilingual paid for his L2 competence by a lowering of his L1 competence. On the basis of the differences in linguistic competence attained by the bilingual subjects in earlier and more recent studies it is hypothesized that the level of linguistic competence attained by a bilingual child may mediate the effects of his bilingual learning experiences on cognitive growth. Specifically, there may be a threshold level of linguistic competence which a bilingual child must attain both in order to avoid cognitive deficits and allow the potentially beneficial aspects of becoming bilingual to influence his cognitive functioning. (Author)
In an experimental study of language switching and selection, bilinguals named numerals in either their first or second language unpredictably. Response latencies (RTs) on switch trials (where the response language changed from the previous trial) were slower than on nonswitch trials. As predicted, the language-switching cost was consistently larger when switching to the dominant L₁ from the weaker L₂ than vice versa such that, on switch trials, L₁ responses were slower than in L₂. This "paradoxical" asymmetry in the cost of switching languages is explained in terms of differences in relative strength of the bilingual's two languages and the involuntary persistence of the previous language set across an intended switch of language. Naming in the weaker language, L₂, requires active inhibition or suppression of the stronger competitor language, L₁; the inhibition persists into the following (switch) trial in the form of "negative priming" of the L₁ lexicon as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studies often report that bilingual participants possess a smaller vocabulary in the language of testing than monolinguals, especially in research with children. However, each study is based on a small sample so it is difficult to determine whether the vocabulary difference is due to sampling error. We report the results of an analysis of 1,738 children between 3 and 10 years old and demonstrate a consistent difference in receptive vocabulary between the two groups. Two preliminary analyses suggest that this difference does not change with different language pairs and is largely confined to words relevant to a home context rather than a school context.
The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.
This book explores the experience of adolescents and young adults who learn a foreign language or use more than one language in daily life. Through ‘language memoirs’ and learners’ testimonies, it documents how these multilingual subjects occupy an embodied, socially and culturally inflected third place in language, filled with memories of other languages and fantasies of other identities. In its referential and mythic dimensions, language performs and creates subjectivities that these multilingual speakers use to conjure alternative worlds and virtual selves, both in real life and on the internet. Teaching to the multilingual subject would mean capitalizing on the potential playfulness, heightened reflexivity and aesthetic sensibility of the increasing number of people around the world who, by choice or necessity, experience life in several languages.
Ce livre explore l’expérience des adolescents et jeunes adultes qui apprennent une langue étrangère ou utilisent plusieurs langues dans leur vie quotidienne. Comme le montrent les récits de vie et autres témoignages linguistiques, ces sujets plurilingues occupent un espace tiers, situé dans la langue et vécu comme réalité corporelle, sociale et culturelle, et où se retrouvent les traces d’autres langues et les rêves d’autres identités. Dans ses dimensions discursives et mythiques, la langue engendre des subjectivités qui permettent a ces locuteurs plurilingues de conjurer des réalités et des identités virtuelles, aussi sur l’internet. Une didactique du plurilinguisme devrait capitaliser sur le potentiel ludique, réflexif et esthétique du nombre croissant de ceux qui, par choix ou par nécessité, font l’expérience de la vie dans plusieurs langues.
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Recognition and interference of a nontarget language (Russian) during production in a target language (English) were tested in Russian-English bilinguals using eye movements and picture naming. In Experiment 1, Russian words drew more eye movements and delayed English naming to a greater extent than control nonwords and English translation equivalents. In Experiment 2, Russian words spelled using English-specific letters drew more eye movements than control nonwords and English translation equivalents; however, both Russian words and nonword controls delayed English naming. Results of the two experiments suggest that nontarget-language information is processed during a target-language task. Recognition and production in bilinguals might function within distinct constraints, with recognition sensitive to lexical information (target and nontarget) and production sensitive to phonological information (lexical and nonlexical).
Adults are notoriously poor second-language (L2) learners. A context that enables successful L2 acquisition is language immersion. In this study, we investigated the effects of immersion learning for a group of university students studying abroad in Spain. Our interest was in the effect of immersion on the native language (L1), English. We tested the hypothesis that immersion benefits L2 learning as a result of attenuated influence of the L1. Participants were English-speaking learners of Spanish who were either immersed in Spanish while living in Spain or exposed to Spanish in the classroom only. Performance on both comprehension and production tasks showed that immersed learners outperformed their classroom counterparts with respect to L2 proficiency. However, the results also revealed that immersed learners had reduced L1 access. The pattern of data is most consistent with the interpretation that the L1 was inhibited while the learners were immersed.
The hypothesis is that mutual interference between the bilingual child's 2 languages forces the child to develop particular coping strategies which in some ways accelerate cognitive development. The sample consisted of 2 groups of Hebrew-English bilingual children, 1 group tested in the United States and the other group tested in Israel, and 2 groups of monolingual Jewish children, with those tested in the United States speaking only English and those tested in Israel speaking only Hebrew. In all groups parent occupation and education level were similarly high. WISC IQ was estimated from 4 subtests-Similarities, Digit Span, Picture Completion, and Picture Arrangement-and statistically controlled. In spite of lower vocabulary level, bilinguals showed more advanced processing of verbal material, more discriminating perceptual distinctions, more propensity to search for structure in perceptual situations, and more capacity to reorganize their perceptions in response to feedback.
Young and Flexible
How an infant learns to understand and speak a language remains a deep scientific mystery even though millions of kids accomplish these feats each year. Furthermore, this learning capacity is apparently not even taxed to its utmost; children who grow up in bilingual families learn two languages just as rapidly as those who learn only one. Kovács and Mehler (p. 611 , published online 9 July) have assessed the cognitive flexibility of preverbal 1-year-old children raised in monolingual versus bilingual households and find that the bilingual group displays an impressive facility in handling inconsistent, language-like, inputs. That is, the kids exposed to two distinct languages since birth were able to associate two distinct syllabic structures—AAB and ABA—with looking leftward and rightward, whereas the monolinguals could only do so only with the simpler AAB structure.
In a semantic priming study, we investigated the processing of German-English homographs such as gift (German = "poison", English = "present") in sentence contexts using a joint reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) measure. Native German speakers with intermediate or advanced knowledge of English (N = 48) performed an all-L2 (English) experiment where sentences such as "The woman gave her friend an expensive gift" (control prime: item) were presented, followed by targets (i.e., boss) for lexical decision. To test the role of global task effects during sentence processing, we presented half the participants (N = 24) with a 20-min silent film narrated in German and half (N = 24) with the film in English before the experiment. To address the development of task effects over time, we analyzed the first and second blocks of the experiment. The results showed a significant interaction between semantic priming, movie version, and block in both the RTs and ERPs: there was significant semantic priming in the RTs and modulations in the N200 and N400 components only for participants who viewed the German movie, and only during the first block. Results suggest that in an all-L2 sentence task with L2 pre-task priming (English film), decision thresholds are raised high enough to eliminate measurable influence of the L1 on the L2. Despite identical material, participants who viewed the German film had to adjust, or zoom in, to the all-L2 task. Implications of this zooming in process in are discussed in terms of the recent Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model of bilingual word recognition [T. Dijkstra, W.J.B. Van Heuven, The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: from identification to decision, Bilingualism: Lang. Cogn. 5 (2002) 175-197].
A Web-based interface has been developed to facilitate researchers in collecting language history information online. Most researchers use their own versions of language history questionnaires for specific studies in second language acquisition. Although these versions of questionnaires all differ from one another in some respects, there is a significant amount of overlap between them. Here we identify the crucial dimensions that most investigators consider important to include in such a questionnaire. We have examined the most commonly asked questions in 41 published questionnaires, and on the basis of our analyses we propose a general L2 language history questionnaire. Subjects can enter some or all of the information on the Web, and the results are automatically generated as an RTF output file on the user's desktop.
Test Your English-Adult Learners
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cambridgeenglish.org/test-your-english/adult-learners/
Web Questionnaire on Bilingualism and Emotion Unpublished manuscript
- J M Dewaele
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Dewaele, J. M., and A. Pavlenko. 2001. "Web Questionnaire on Bilingualism and Emotion." Unpublished manuscript,
Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, University of London, London, UK.
The Social Science Perspective In Bilingual Education: Current Perspectives-Social Science
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Fishman, J. A. 1977. "The Social Science Perspective." In Bilingual Education: Current Perspectives-Social Science. vol. 1, 149. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Review of Mary Besemeres' Translating One's Self
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Haiman, J. 2005. "Review of Mary Besemeres' Translating One's Self." Culture and Psychology 11 (1): 111-116.
Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? Accessed
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The Self-Report Method In Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology
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A copy of the questionnaire used to investigate the bilingual perception of bilingualism 8) How old were you when you began learning English? 9) Where did you learn English? (home, school, both, other)
- Appendix
Appendix. A copy of the questionnaire used to investigate the bilingual perception
of bilingualism
8) How old were you when you began learning English?
9) Where did you learn English? (home, school, both, other)