Date: 04-Aug-2006
From: Magdalena Fialkowska <kilarskamac.com>
Subject: Childhood Bilingualism
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-671.html
EDITORS: Peggy McCardle and Erika HoffTITLE: Childhood BilingualismSUBTITLE: Research On Infancy through School AgeSERIES: Child Language and Child Development 7PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters Ltd.YEAR: 2006
Magdalena Fialkowska, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK
INTRODUCTION
The book under review features a selection of papers on childhoodbilingualism by researchers from Canada and the United States. It is aproduct of a workshop on childhood bilingualism convened in Washington, DCin April 2004, sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health andHuman Development and the Office of English Language Acquisition and Officeof Special Education and Rehabilitation Services of the US Department ofEducation. The goal of this workshop was to discuss the issue of bilingualdevelopment in general, and the questions of children's bilingual languagelearning experiences, children's literacy and the relation of educationalprograms to academic outcomes in children raised in bilingual environments.In a nutshell, the aim of this volume is to describe the state of researchconducted in the area of childhood bilingualism and to propose a researchagenda for the future.
STRUCTURE
The book is divided into 11 chapters in five thematic sections:
Part 1: Processing Two LanguagesChapter 1: Bilingual Speech Processing in Infants and AdultsChapter 2: When Infants Hear Two Languages: Interpreting ResearchChapter 3: The Onset of Word Form Recognition in One Language and in Two
Part 2: Learning Two LanguagesChapter 4: Bilingual First Language Acquisition in PerspectiveChapter 5: Social Factors in Bilingual Development: The Miami Experience
Part 3: Literacy in Two LanguagesChapter 6: Developing Literacy in English-language Learners: An Examinationof the Impact of English-only Versus Bilingual InstructionChapter 7: Bilingualism at School: Effect on the Acquisition of Literacy
Part 4: Perspectives on Childhood Bilingualism from Related FieldsChapter 8: Adult Bilingualism and Bilingual DevelopmentChapter 9: Finding the Points of Contact: Language Acquisition in ChildrenRaised in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Environments
Part 5: Closing CommentsChapter 10: Multiple Perspectives on Research on Childhood BilingualismChapter 11: An Agenda for Research on Childhood Bilingualism
The Contributors
SUMMARY
Chapter 1, by Janet F. Werker, Whitney M. Weikum and Katherine A. Yoshida,offers a review of bilingual acquisition research and attempts to find outwhether bilingual infants show the same or different trajectories forphonological acquisition as do monolingual ones. The authors address thequestion of phonological processing in bilinguals, as they strongly believethat the understanding of how speech develops and is processed should bebased on the results of studies examining mostly bilingual speakers. Ofinterest to the authors is also whether adult bilinguals perceive speechsimilarly or differently to monolinguals. A set of tools used by Werker andher colleagues consists of a questionnaire developed by Alain Desrochers(2003) to assess adult language dominance, and a parent report scaledesigned by Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (1997) to ensure that the bilingualinfants have had relatively equal exposure to each of their languages.Throughout the whole chapter Werker and her colleagues refer to those whoacquired their two languages from and an early age as ''bilingual firstlanguage'' learners. This informative analysis tells us about monolingualand bilingual adult phonetic perception as well as bilingual infantphonetic perception. Those brief comparative analyses show that perceptionof phonetic continua is language specific, and that adults have difficultyin discriminating any new phonetic differences absent from their native L1.As to bilingual infants, the data suggests that there may be more that onepattern to phonetic perception. Moreover, the native language phoneticcategories guide word learning once they infants are able to accessphonetic detail. In general, the studies described by Werker and hercolleagues confirm that bilingual acquisition influences all aspects ofspeech processing, and that the developmental trajectory is different forbilinguals, which makes bilingual language processing unique. For reliableresults in the future, the authors recommend investigating phonological usefrom the functional perspective of bilingual speakers, as well asdetermining factors such as maternal language and the amount of exposure.They also advocate determining the conditions under which the phoneticsystem of the two languages can be equally dominant.
In Chapter 2, Anne Fernald attempts to contrast three major traditions inbasic research on early language development. Her comparative analysis ismade along two key dimensions: how they these traditions characterise andmeasure language competence at different ages, and the extent to which eachis concerned with features of the early language development. The first andoldest paradigm (Brown, 1973) is mostly observational in nature and itsgoal is to investigate the influence of various aspects of speech on thechild's developing linguistic competence. The second paradigm (Woodward,1997) uses experimental methods to examine the way that children understandnovel words. The measure of child's competence is mostly defined in termsof a forced-choice behaviour by the child. Finally, infant speechperception approach (Jusczyk 1997; Kuhl 2000) investigates the developmentof infants' sensitivity to regularities in the ambient language(s). Fernaldunderlines strong points as well as weaknesses in these methods, e.g., theexperimental way is high in experimental control, but the issue of languageinput is rarely relevant, while in the infant speech perception approach,the relation between the child's phonological knowledge and theirperformance is not straightforward due to small mean differences inattention to one stimulus type over another. What also emerges from thischapter is a discrepancy between experiments with monolingual and bilingualinfants. Bilingual children seem to be delayed relative to monolingualones, who can discriminate English speech contrast earlier than BFLlearners. Fernald's prediction was that since monolingual infants make a'neural commitment' to the phonological system of their native language,bilingual children would show specialization in two different languages.She attempts to interpret discrepant results suggesting that bilingualinfants hear less speech in either language, and stresses that anyinterpretations of these results must be based on the question of howlinguistic competence is operationalised in a given experimental design, aswell as the question of how adequately early language experience ischaracterized and assessed. By and large, this chapter shows that typicallydeveloping infants learn to map out the phonological categories of theambient language over the 1st year, and that BFLA infants should not betreated as two monolinguals in one. It is not surprising they areperforming differently from monolinguals, if they have to form much broadercategories in their linguistic system.
Chapter 3 closes the first part of the book. Marilyn M. Wihman, Jarrad A.G.Lum, Guillaume Thierry, Satsuki Nakai and Tamar Keren-Portnoy illustratetheir findings and compare them with earlier studies, focusing ondetermining the infants' age of onset of word form recognition in theabsence of experimental training or contextual support. Two pioneeringstudies to investigate this question are presented. They have beenconducted by Hallé and Boysson-Bardies (1994) with use of the PreferentialHead-Turn Paradigm (HT), and by Thierry et al (2003), who used the EventRelated Potentials technique (ERP). In their own study, Wihman and hercolleagues pursue the same question using HT and ERP in parallel with eachinfant. In addition, they try to determine the role played by bilingualismon the timing of the onset of word form recognition. They testedmonolingual English- and Welsh-learning infants, and English-Welshbilingual infants. New stimuli were developed for both languages, aiming ata similar selection of familiar words. Their overall findings indicate thatat 12 months of age monolingual infants show a decline in the familiarityeffect, which Vihman and colleagues interpret as a loss of infants'interest in word form as they are expecting words to convey meaning. Incontrast to the HT findings, ERP procedure did not reveal any significanteffect of word familiarity in bilingual infants. Moreover, bilingualinfants' response tended to be delayed relative to the monolingual children.
Chapter 4, by Fred Genesee, opens a section on learning two languages. Theauthor first provides a brief summary of BFLA studies, which started in1913 with Ronjat's research, through Leopold's work in 1939-49, till the1980s when BFLA began to flourish (e.g., Meisel's, De Houwer's or Lanza'swork). We learn that research on BLFA can not only make a uniquecontribution to our understanding of the human language faculty, but alsohave implications for our conceptualization of the neuro-cognitivearchitecture of the human mind. There follows a brief account of areasinvestigated by BFLA researchers: morphosyntax, lexicon and phonologicaldevelopment. In the area of morphosyntax, the key questions are the precisepattern of development of the two languages and its time course, as well aslanguage differentiation. Children mastering two languages simultaneouslyacquire language-specific morphosyntactic properties of the targetlanguages corresponding to monolingual patterns. The lexical development ofBLF learners has not been as broadly described as morphosyntacticdevelopment. Research in this field (Pearson 1993; Pearson 1995) has shownthat although bilingual children often score lower on standardized tests ofvocabulary when each language is considered separately, the totalconceptual vocabulary of those children equals that of the monolinguals.Findings in the area of phonological development are regarded tentative dueto scarcity of studies as well as ''the diversity of issues examined'' (p.50). Following a definition of intra- and inter-utterance mixing, theauthor compares grammatical and functional properties of code-mixing inchild speech and discusses grammatical constraints in bilingual childcode-mixing. Genesee claims that evidence of such constraints would providesignificant insights into child's linguistic capacity and languagelearning, and would mean that they ''emerge with the advent of grammaticalcompetence'' (p. 52). Most importantly, Genesee stresses that bilingualchild code-mixing is a communicative resource for children, and not a signof their confusion. The last section of this paper discusses bilingualcommunicative competence, and some additional challenges that bilingualchildren have to face. In the concluding section the author welcomesstudies on the different age of onset of dual language exposure and therelationship between the input and learning outcomes.
Rebecca E. Eilers, Barbara Zurer Pearson and Alan B. Cobo-Lewis beginChapter 5 with a picture of the Hispanic community in Miami. The authorslook briefly at types of bilingual development, and language alternativesfor immigrants. They elaborate on the so-called ''three-generation rule'',according to which adults remain monolingual in their native language,their children become fluently bilingual, and their grandchildren arelargely monolingual English speakers. In the brief summary of two previousstudies, one by Lambert and Taylor (1996) and the other by Hakuta andD'Andrea (1992), who adopted the concept of ''Immigration Depth'', theauthors stress the importance of three major variables to be taken intoaccount: generation (depth), social class and language attitudes. Their ownstudy is focused around the following question: how often and in whatcircumstances is the speakers' abstract choice of language decided infavour of the minority language? Eilers and her colleagues conducted theirresearch in various age groups trying to find evidence of Spanish languagemaintenance at higher immigration 'depth'. They look at language attitudes,language choice, language use among bilinguals, perceptions of language useand proficiency in two languages. Their findings show that Spanish islosing in its battle with English. Only one family completed the studyproviding equal exposure to both languages, although all of them hadassured the researchers they would do so. Bilingualism is a bridge betweencommunities, but it declines once more people become bilingual - theyusually choose to speak English. This chapter also shows that the two-wayschools do not offer any threat to English proficiency, so the greatestthreat to the maintenance of Spanish in Miami is the fact that thislanguage is not officially perceived as being under threat.
Chapter 6, by Diane August, Margarita Calderón, María Carlo and MichelleNuttall, starts a section concerned with literacy in two languages. Its aimis to examine the effect of the language of instruction on Broad Readingoutcomes for three groups of Spanish-speaking students: those instructedonly in English, only in Spanish and those instructed bilingually. Theauthors debate which model is most effective, and mention a series ofreviews over the past 25 years, which have reached different conclusions.Their study aims at improving the weaknesses that characterize previousresearch. In order to do so, the authors have drawn students from the sameschools and neighbourhoods, ensuring that they had been in the sameinstructional group since they had begun school. August and her colleagueshypothesize that students instructed bilingually or only in Spanish wouldoutperform those instructed in English on measures of Spanish reading atthe end of grade 5, and vice versa. The results show that Spanish-speakingchildren achieved significantly different reading outcomes depending on thelanguage of instruction. If the instruction in Spanish was followed byinstruction in English, Spanish-speaking children benefited more. Theyperform both in Spanish and English equally well as students instructedonly in English or only in Spanish.
In Chapter 7, Ellen Bialystok asks the following questions: is the processof acquiring literacy skills different for bilingual children than formonolinguals specifically because they are bilingual? What is the relationbetween the progress in the acquisition of literacy in each of the twolanguages for bilingual children? According to Bialystok, the answers tothese two questions may reveal how literacy is related to other cognitiveor linguistic skills. The author underlines that the manner in whichbilingualism influences each skill is different. Since bilingualism hasalready been shown to influence acquisition of each component, Bialystokstresses that it may be responsible for the alternations of the course ofdevelopment for bilingual children. Her aim is also to help us understandthe role that bilingualism plays in becoming literate. It becomes clearthat the three key factors - oral proficiency, development of printconcepts and metalinguistic awareness - make different predictions for therole of bilingualism in learning to read. Bialystok's analysis is based onthree studies. The first aims at establishing the role of bilingualism inchildren's becoming literate by determining the role of language and scriptdifferences that intervene in this relation. In the second one Bialystokexamines the development of reading and phonological awareness in bilingualchildren whose two languages are based on different systems. Finally, thethird study considers the question whether the acquisition of literacywould also be affected for children who were second-language learners. Eachof the studies shows that exposure to two languages and learning to read intwo languages influenced the manner in which the children were acquiringliteracy skills in English. The children learning two alphabetic languagesprofited particularly, while bilingual English-Chinese children revealedphonological awareness across languages. Bialystok's main conclusion isthat the answer to the question whether or not bilingualism affectschildren's acquisition of literacy is heavily influenced by variouscircumstances.
Chapter 8, unlike the preceding ones, is not based on statistical data. Itopens a section concerned with the perspectives on childhood bilingualismseen from other fields. Judith F. Kroll discusses three main issues.Firstly, she elaborates on the ways adult bilinguals negotiate parallelactivity and interactions of their two languages. We learn about studiesinvestigating the nonselectivity of language processing, when adultbilinguals have little control over the process of activation of their twolanguages, and when there is a high degree of permeability across languageboundaries. Next, Kroll elaborates on the cognitive consequences ofcross-language activation, one of which is superior attentional control foryoung bilingual children and elderly bilingual adults. Finally, Krollconsiders phonological and semantic factors leading to constraints onbilingual language performance.
In Chapter 9, Sandra Waxman looks at the findings emerging from basicpsychological research on early word learning and conceptual organizationin infants and young children acquiring a single language. She thenidentifies points of contact for research on acquisition from monolingual,bilingual and multilingual perspectives. Waxman's concern is the infants'ability to discover grammatical forms represented in their language, andhow they learn to map these forms to meaning. She presents two experiments:one based on a novelty-preference task, and the other on identifyingobjects and mapping them to object categories. We learn that the linkbetween nouns and object categories, which emerge early, may be universal,while the specific link between adjectives and their meaning, which emergeslater, may vary systematically as a function of the structure of a givenlanguage. As to the points of contact, Waxman stresses the importance ofcollating information on bilingual and multilingual environments, as wellas posing precise questions. She draws our attention to the fact thatdepending on whether the L1-L2 mismatches occur in the semantic,morphological or syntactic system, the relation between two languages canbe a source of significant issues for child language research. Finally,Waxman suggests launching a full and integrated research agenda focused onlanguage acquisition in bilingual and multilingual children in order tofoster collaboration between researchers and clinicians. Such an agenda mayresult in an in-depth exploration of the linguistic and conceptualconsequences of acquiring more than one language.
Chapter 10 and 11 constitute the closing section of the book. First, MarthaCrago looks at the implications for multiple perspectives emerging from thediscussion by the researchers from Canada and the US brought together inthis volume. She tries to capture the essence of the exchange among theassembled researchers by addressing issues of bilingual research that cutacross various domains, e.g., national policies, methodologies, ortheoretical and disciplinary contributions. In conclusion, Crago summarizesthe aims of this volume, highlights the significance of studies onbilingual language acquisition, and explains the ways to create linksbetween fields investigating this area, stressing the fact that the futuretraining of researchers needs to expose them to the links between varioustheoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives. In the finalchapter, the editors, i.e. Peggy McCardle and Erika Hoff provide a list ofissues that need to be investigated in the research on childhoodbilingualism. We need to adopt a broad approach in order to document theforms that environmental bilingualism takes, as well as the processesshaping bilingual children's development. There is also a great need notonly for descriptive work to address the social, cultural and linguisticcontexts of bilingual development, but also for experimental work todetermine the most effective methods of formal language and literacyinstructions for bilingual and English language learners students.Additionally, better assessment instruments for oral language productionand comprehension should be developed and integrated with innovativeresearch design and methodology. The final outcome of this volume is farfrom definitive, but the discussion sheds interesting light on thesignificance of the research in bilingual and multilingual languagedevelopment.
EVALUATION
This small collection will be a valuable source of information for scholarsand students working in the area of bilingualism and bilingual childlanguage acquisition. The wealth of information offered in this volumerequires however some background in statistics, since many articles arebased on statistical data analysis. Even though some fragments may seemeasy and pleasurable to read, some sections consist of pure statisticaldata analysis. Moreover, the discussion and implications of the studies canbe at times quite challenging and can require more background knowledgeabout the subject. Of great help in this book is the fact that all thecontributors briefly summarize the state of art in the given area, whichenhances the reader's orientation in the field and gives a good startingpoint for a more thorough analysis. Each article is rich in questions,suggestions and ideas, which taken together show how much remains to bedone in the field of bilingual child language acquisition in order to placeall the missing pieces of information in correct places. The editing ofthis volume is generally careful, with very few spelling errors.
A few inconsistencies have been found in the editing of the references,e.g., ''Fledge 1996'', given in the references as ''Feldge 1986'' (P. 6) , or''Pearson 1999'' (p. 63) is missing from the references. Otherinconsistencies include, e.g., the statement ''... newborns (...)discriminate languages from two different rhythmical classes (e.g., stressvs. syllable timed languages such as French vs. English...''), which shouldin fact be ''English vs. French'' (P. 10).
A welcome addition to the book would be a glossary of acronyms used in thechapters. This would allow readers to choose an article they would like toread without the fear that something has been explained earlier,particularly when new acronyms are introduced in a given paper, and othersare being referred to, including those from other papers in the volume.
Generally, this book refers to the bilingual situation in Canada and theUSA, which may narrow down the readership. This is not a guidebook forparents who raise their children bilingually and need practical advice onhow to do it effectively. This volume is aimed instead researchers andstudents investigating bilingual language development and seekingprofessionally provided data and discussion.
To conclude, this collection will be a valuable source of information toanyone who wants to update their knowledge on bilingual languageacquisition and related topics, such as language processing in bilingualinfants, literacy in two languages, adult bilingual development andmultilingual environments.
REFERENCES
Bosch, L. - N. Sebastián-Gallés 1997. Infant bilingual languagequestionnaire. Unpublished instrument.: Universitat de Barcelona,Barcelona, Spain.
Brown, R. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. London: George Allen &Unwin.
Desrochers, Alain. 2003. Fluency assessment questionnaire forEnglish-French bilinguals. Unpublished instrument: Cognitive PsychologyLaboratory, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Hakuta, K. - D. D'Andrea. 1992. Some properties of bilingual maintenanceand loss in Mexican background high-school students Applied Linguistics13.72-99.
Hallé, P. - B. de Boysson-Bardies 1994. Emergence of an early lexicon:Infants' recognition of words. Infant Behaviour and development, 17.119-29.
Jusczyk, P. W. 1997. The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.
Kuhl, P.K. . 1997. A new view of language acquisition. Paper presented atProceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Lambert, W. E. - D. M. Taylor 1996. Language in the lives of ethnicminorities: Cuban-American families in Miami. Applied Linguistics, 17.477-500.
Pearson, B. Z. - S. C. Fernández - D. K. Oller. 1995. Cross-languagesynonyms in the lexicon of bilingual infants: One language or two? Journalof Child Language, 22.345-68.
Pearson, B. Z. - S. C. Fernández - D. K. Oller 1993. Lexical development inbilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. LanguageLearning, 43.93-120.
Thierry, G. - M. Vihman - M. Roberts. 2003. Familiar words capture theattention of 11-month-olds in less then 250 ms. Neuroreport, 14.2307-10.
Woodward, A. - E.M. Markman. 1997. Early word learning Handbook of ChildPsychology, ed. by W. Damion - D. Kuhn - R. Sieger. New York: Wiley.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Magdalena Fialkowska is a Ph.D. student in the Surrey Morphology Group atthe University of Surrey, UK. She is working on the early development ofgender system in the speech of Polish-English bilingual children. Herproject is focused on the cross-linguistic interference in BFLA.
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