"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."
EDITOR: Pavlenko, Aneta TITLE: The Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Interdisciplinary Approaches SERIES: Bilingual Education and Bilingualism PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters YEAR: 2009
Matthew T. Carlson, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
SUMMARY This volume is intended as an interdisciplinary overview of the state of the art in bilingualism research, focusing on the lexicon. It will thus be particularly useful to students and young researchers working in particular areas of bilingualism, who are interested in situating their work within a larger context of bilingualism research and in expanding their theoretical and methodological repertoire. The scope is ambitious for a book less than 250 pages, but this perhaps serves to highlight the diverse challenges faced by researchers working on bilingualism, and it helps make the point that bilingualism requires a diverse approach that views the phenomena under study through a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses. The chapters are organized around a particular set of questions or sub-phenomena of bilingualism, rather than around a particular methodology, comprising neurolinguistic research (Meuter), autobiographical memory (Schrauf), audio-visual integration (Marian), semantic processing (Altarriba & Basnight-Brown), lexical transfer (Jarvis), conceptual representation (Pavlenko), gesture (Gullberg), the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (Ecke), and L1 attrition (Schmid & Köpke). Among these chapters there is a good deal of methodological overlap (notwithstanding significant contrasts), representing behavioral and reaction time experiments on formal and semantic processing, neuroimaging and aphasia, eye tracking, crosslinguistic comparison, narrative, gesture, and naturalistic data sampling. Lending a measure of unity to such a diverse collection of chapters, many of the authors also tie their reviews to significant models of bilingual lexical processing, e.g. the Bilingual Interactive Activation model (BIA, BIA+; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002), the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM; Kroll & Stewart, 1994), and the model of Levelt et al. (1999).
Each chapter provides a well-rounded introduction to a particular subfield of bilingualism research, and the book is edited in such a way that the chapters have a roughly similar format. The individual chapter authors outline the research questions relevant to their sub-area, which are in some cases quite specific, and provide a review of the methodological approaches that have been taken. The authors then present main findings from the subfield in question, and point the way forward. This last part tends to focus on the future directions most relevant for the particular subfield, rather than being an attempt to tie each chapter into the larger volume.
EVALUATION The stated purpose of the volume is to outline the state of the art in a diverse range of inquiry on bilingualism, and the chapters in general deliver on this goal in a thorough and readable way. However, any compendium of this sort runs the risk of leaving the reader a bit confused as to the larger picture, and in this case more could have been done to help the reader make sense of the multiple perspectives that are undoubtedly crucial to understanding a phenomenon as complex as the use of multiple languages. The authors are unified in their focus on the bilingual lexicon, but the strong focus on giving a thorough picture of each sub-area leaves the chapters relatively independent from each other. The book therefore has an interdisciplinary feel to it, rather than being truly multidisciplinary, in the sense of integrating multiple perspectives into a cohesive, compound approach. What would be most helpful would be a concluding chapter dedicated to integrating the interdisciplinarity represented in the chapters, helping the reader to sort out what is shared and what is distinct in the view of the bilingual lexicon taken by each of the authors, and charting a way forward from that integrated perspective. Such a view is foreshadowed in the preface, entitled ''Time for new metaphors?'', which points to a unifying principle, namely a dynamic view of the lexicon. While many of the authors engage with this concept, a concluding chapter that takes a critical view of all of the contributions, integrating and evaluating them in terms of this overarching view as well as in light of each other, is notably lacking.
That said, by gathering such diverse approaches in one place this book does much to illustrate the need for an integrated perspective. In selecting the specific chapters, Pavlenko addresses the need for a concise review of current findings and the theoretical models they have engendered, a description of the range of methods available and how they have been implemented to explore specific research questions, and fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the lexicon, bilingualism, and cognition. The chapters by Meuter, Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, and Jarvis all provide concise but thorough reviews of major, general areas of inquiry. Altarriba & Basnight-Brown discuss work on semantic correspondence between first (L1) and second (L2) language words, relying specifically on semantic, translation, and cognate priming as well as categorization, naming, and interference tasks such as the Stroop task. The chapter focuses on integrating findings from this range of experimental work, but takes a relatively uncritical stance towards what are admittedly very well-established findings. Meuter discusses similar results, placing them within the larger frame of questions regarding the selectivity of bilingual lexical access and control in language selection, and provides ample discussion of several models of bilingual lexical representation and processing. The primary thrust of this chapter, however, is to argue for the use of electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques and the investigation of aphasia in bilinguals to shed light on these questions. As such, this chapter is perhaps the most general, presenting new techniques that may be adapted to work in a wide variety of areas. Consistent with this goal, this relatively dense chapter crucially emphasizes the need to understand these new techniques, and to exercise good experimental design and controls, underscoring this point by describing a series of conflicting and unclear findings from both behavioral and neuroscientific research.
The chapter by Jarvis focuses on lexical transfer, defining transfer broadly as when one language affects the knowledge or processing of another. The chapter is conceptually oriented, with minimal discussion of methods, which in many cases are described more fully in other chapters anyway. Jarvis clarifies the exposition by emphasizing a clear distinction between lexeme (mainly formal characteristics of words) and lemma (semantic and syntactic information) level transfer, as well as arguing for a separate conceptual level. While this brings a measure of order to the literature, where these levels of representation are often conflated to varying degrees, it also runs the danger of obscuring relevant distinctions or of demarcating boundaries between different levels too starkly. In particular, this chapter could have benefited from some discussion of usage-based or emergentist views of the lexicon, in which boundaries between levels are less distinct. The same could be said of the volume as a whole. Particularly in light of the goal of working towards a dynamic view of the bilingual lexicon, an emergentist or cognitive linguistics point of view might help to integrate diverse areas of research and point the way forward (cf. the recent Handbook by Robinson & Ellis, 2008).
Jarvis and Altarriba & Basnight-Brown set the stage for Pavlenko's own contribution, in which she shifts the focus from links between words to the structure of conceptual categories itself. This is the most integrative chapter of the book. Taking the chapters by Meuter, Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, and Jarvis as a point of departure, Pavlenko pulls apart the assumption that stronger connections between words indicate shared meanings. This opens the way to asking how conceptual representations overlap and contrast, and how these representations evolve as an individual learns a new language. This is reminiscent of work inspired by Slobin's notion of 'Thinking for Speaking' (1996; discussed in Gullberg's chapter on gesture), but Pavlenko situates her review in terms of models of how words and concepts in two languages are related in the bilingual lexicon. Based on the observation that linguistic categories between languages may be equivalent, partially equivalent, or non-equivalent, Pavlenko argues for a Modified Hierarchical Model, which enriches the RHM of Kroll & Stewart (1994) with these different types of conceptual structure and with links for conceptual transfer between languages. This intuitive model generates a wide variety of new questions about, e.g. interactions between semantic and conceptual structure, implicit and explicit learning, speech errors, and instruction. In this the chapter strongly points to fruitful areas of future inquiry, and it also fleshes out one way in which the bilingual lexicon may be viewed as dynamically evolving.
While Pavlenko enriches our view of conceptual structure, linking the bilingual lexicon intimately to a bilingual's use of language in specific contextual situations, the chapters by Schrauf, Marian, and Gullberg all open links between language and other aspects of cognition. Schrauf grounds the mental lexicon functionally by exploring its role in a higher-level cognitive phenomenon, autobiographical memory. In particular, he explores the language specificity effect, whereby bilinguals experience specific memories primarily in one language or the other, and situates the discussion in a neurocognitive framework in which meaning is distributed across sensory cortices and interacts with lexicosemantic memory. Given the sparsity of research on this area, the chapter provides an easy-to-follow introduction for linguists and psycholinguists unfamiliar with this framework. The bulk of the discussion centers on the psycholinguistic properties of words that may modulate the latency of recall, the recency of the episode recalled, or other aspects of autobiographical memory in a particular language, which is then exemplified in a study comparing how bilinguals recalled episodes given either picture cues or word cues varying in imageability and concreteness. This study showed a language specificity effect for L2 memories but not for L1. While this area of research is young, it is apparent that research on memory and the lexicon will be crucial to exploring not only how language affects how memories are encoded and recalled, but also how experience contributes to the development of linguistic categories.
Marian and Gullberg focus on how information is integrated across modalities in lexical processing. Gullberg's contribution in particular demonstrates the breadth of work brought together in this volume by exploring the relevance of co-speech gesture to research on the bilingual lexicon, focusing particularly on gesture's role in speech production. After providing readers with a necessary and well-executed overview of gesture research methods and major theories, Gullberg proceeds to describe how gesture changes our view of the lexicon, aligning her argument with work that includes syntactic, constructional, and conceptual information in the lexicon. The discussion of gestures standing in for words is appropriately brief, leaving the way open for how investigating the timing, form, and distribution of gesture-speech combinations provides a crucial window on conceptual development in bilinguals, such as is discussed in Pavlenko's chapter. By virtue of their imagistic and synthetic nature (McNeill, 2005), gestures provide a non-linear indication of what information is packaged together into units. The discussion is somewhat limited by the dominance of motion event descriptions in the literature on gesture, but this is not necessarily detrimental to the argument here. Rather, cross-disciplinary research using gesture to look at the bilingual lexicon may symbiotically reveal new ways forward for gesture research as well.
This approach fits well within the multimodal view of processing elaborated by Marian. Marian takes a broad view of the integration of audio-visual information that includes not only speech, facial expression and gesture, but also the visual environment, and even visual information not necessarily present, such as knowledge of orthography. This makes the chapter feel a bit over-ambitious, but Marian strikes a balance, drawing parallels between work on audio-visual integration in lexical processing in particular visual environments (e.g. with certain artifacts present in the visual field), and work that may more properly pertain to the lexicon, i.e. the integration of phonological and orthographic information in word processing. She discusses several models for understanding this multimodal view of processing before settling on an adaptation of the COHORT model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987). This chapter describes an emerging picture of ''opportunistic'' (p. 58) processing that is multimodal by nature, but the chapter struggles with an implicit tension between viewing this system as fundamentally multimodal vs. examining how the visual modality (and orthography) add to or build upon (auditory) linguistic processing. This tension is never quite resolved, and appears particularly in the discussion of differences in mono- and bilinguals' reliance on auditory and visual information, for example in noisy listening situations. On the other hand, this tension itself may provide an important way forward for research on multimodal processing.
The one chapter that struggles a bit to find its place in this volume is the chapter by Ecke on tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. The chapter builds on the (not unproblematic) assumption that TOT states slow down lexical access, making it more easily observable. The chapter provides a detailed overview of the research questions traditionally associated with TOT research, including whether access is blocked or activation is incomplete, whether speakers differ in their susceptibility (as bilinguals are thought to do), and how TOTs are resolved. The principal methods and findings of this work are then reviewed, with special focus on the few findings on bi/multilinguals and L2 learners but also supplying a broader view of monolingual TOT research that may be relevant to bilingualism as well. The chapter is primarily given to a comprehensive and easy-to-follow review of the past literature, and largely leaves it up to the reader to work out how it contributes to the overall goals of the volume.
The final chapter, by Schmid and Köpke, addresses yet another area of bilingualism research, that of L1 attrition and the lifelong evolution of the bilingual lexicon. But it also provides a fitting close to the volume (in the absence of a final, synthesizing chapter) by bringing the issue of dynamism in the lexicon to the fore. This is at least in part due to tension in the definition of attrition itself. In reviewing the findings, the authors focus on adult immigrants, where L1 change can be most clearly labeled attrition. Theoretically, they point to two principal factors contributing to attrition, internal (structural influence of the L2 on the L1) and external (reduction in L1 use/input), and restrict their definition of attrition to cases in which both of these are operating. On the other hand, they describe a set of possible interactions between L2 and L1 including borrowing, restructuring, convergence, and shift, which they argue tend to enrich the L1 system, whereas cases of attrition witness a simplification or shrinking of the L1 system. However, it is unclear how to measure such simplification, and the text struggles between using simplification or the confluence of internal and external factors to characterize attrition. On the one hand the authors resist a deficit model of bilingualism, in which the acquisition of a second language is accompanied by a decrement in L1 competence, but on the other hand their portrayal of attrition also seems to encompass the changes to L1 knowledge or use that begin with the onset of bilingualism. It is thus unclear whether or how attrition might be distinguished theoretically from the dynamic evolution of the mental lexicon through the onset of bilingualism and subsequent evolution of an individual's language use patterns; perhaps this dynamic is better thought of as a continuum, with attrition describing one extreme, beyond some fuzzy threshold. The authors give credence to this position when they say ''it is therefore possible that the process of restructuring of the L1, which we perceive as attrition in long-term immigrants, is a gradual one which starts...with the onset of bilingualism'' (p. 129). This suggests that it may be more fruitful to seek to understand how language knowledge evolves throughout the lifespan and in response to various types of experience, including bilingualism (see also Hall, Cheng, & Carlson, 2006), than to focus too much on distinguishing attrition from other aspects of lifelong language development.
The instability and tension exemplified in this final chapter appears to certain degrees in many chapters in this book, but rather than a weakness, it is a necessary and desirable result of bringing together diverse areas of research, in this case, work on crosslinguistic associations and influence and language attrition. When work in one area is reviewed in light of other points of view, theories and models are refined, and a way forward can be laid out. This volume thus achieves its goal of bringing together an interdisciplinary collection of research methods, theories, and findings among which new ideas and approaches can be generated. In doing so, it builds a foundation for future, cross-disciplinary work on bilingualism and the bilingual lexicon.
REFERENCES Dijkstra, T. & Van Heuven, W.J.B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5, 175-197.
Hall, J.K., Cheng. A. & Carlson, M.T. (2006). Reconceptualizing Multicompetence as a Theory of Language Knowledge. Applied Linguistics 27 (2), 220-240.
Kroll, J. & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connection between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language 33 (2), 149-174.
Levelt, W., Roelofs, A. & Meyer, A. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, 1-37.
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition. Cognition 25, 71-102.
McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, P. & Ellis, N.C. (2008). Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge.
Slobin, D. (1996). From 'thought and language' to 'thinking for speaking'. In J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds.). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 70-96.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Dr. Carlson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Chicago. His interests include emergent grammar in bilingualism and first
language acquisition, phonology and morphology in the lexicon, and
co-speech gesture.
