Dr.

Zainab Ali
Course 228 Language acquisition
Handout 12

Bilingualism and second language acquisition

If a speaker is fluent in two languages, then they are said to be bilingual. The commonly held
image of a bilingual person is of someone brought up in a culture where they are exposed to
two languages from birth. It is not necessary for them to be equally fluent in both languages,
but at least they should be very competent in the second one. This definition of bilingualism
is a little vague as it depends on what we mean by ‘fluent’.

Bilingualism is common in some parts of the world: North Wales and Welsh-English; Canada
and French- English.

By convention the language learned first is called L1 and the language learned second is
called L2. Sometimes, however, the two languages are learned simultaneously, and
sometimes the language that is learned first turns out to be the secondary language of use in
later life.

We can distinguish between simultaneous bilingualism (L1 and L2 learned about the same
time), early sequential bilingualism (L1 learned first, but L2 learned relatively early, in
childhood), and late (in adolescence onwards) bilingualism.

A number of factors determines which language people use in a bilingual society:

• The speaker’s home background is very important.

• Some societies have a history of attempting to impose one language as being higher in
prestige than others.
• Using a particular language may be a signal of solidarity with or distance from others.

The advantages of being bilingual

Bilingual children suffer no obvious linguistic disadvantages from learning two languages
simultaneously. There might be some initial delay in learning vocabulary items in one
language, but this delay is soon made up, and of course the total bilingual vocabulary of the
children is much greater.

Bilingualism also has costs and benefits for other aspects of cognitive processing. Bilingual
people tend to have a slight deficit in cognitive processing and working memory for tasks that

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are carried out in L2. On the other hand, they show clear gains in metalinguistic awareness
and cognitive flexibility and superior verbal fluency. For example, Lambert, Tucker and
d’Anglejan (1973) found that children in the Canadian immersion program (for learning
French) tended to score more highly on tests of creativity than monolinguals. Bilingual
children, compared with monolingual children, show an advantage in knowing that a word is
an arbitrary name for something.

Although some researchers have argued that there is no obvious processing cost attached to
being bilingual, others have found indications of interference between L1 and L2. For
example, increasing proficiency in L2 by immigrant children is associated with reduced
speed of access to L1. B. Harley and Wang (1997, p.44) conclude that ‘monoligual-like
attainment in each of a bilingual’s two languages is probably a myth (at any age).’

On the other hand, there is now an overwhelming body of research showing that bilingualism
confers a general cognitive advantage in the form of enhanced flexibility. There is even
evidence that being bilingual protects people to some extent against developing Alzheimer’s
disease by helping to build up the mind’s ‘cognitive reserve’.

Working memory

It has been defined as referring to “the temporary storage of information that is being process
in any range of cognitive tasks” (Baddeley, 1986, p.34).

The need for temporary storage is easy to see. Many cognitive processes require that we hold
onto information for a short period of time. For example, when we have a conversation with
another person, we try to relate our contributions to what our conversational partner has just
said. This requires us to hold onto some portion of the other person’s contribution
temporarily while we try to decide how to respond.

Another example is trying to remember a phone number that is spoken to you as you dial it.
We need to hold the digits somewhere for a short period of time, and that somewhere has
been termed ‘working memory’.

Working memory is measured in several ways. The most simple is a memory span test (or
simple span test) in which participants are given a series of items (words, letters, numbers,
and so forth) and asked to recall the items in the order presented. Sometimes they are asked to
recall them in backward order. A person’s memory span is the number of items that can be
reliably recalled in the correct order.

The Baddeley-Hitch Model

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 Figure 1 The model of working memory proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974)

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed a model of working memory, which has subsequently
been revised a number of times (Baddeley, 1986, 2002). Throughout the revisions, the model
has three components, which are called the central executive, the visuospatial sketchpad, and
the phonological loop (see Figure 1).

The phonological loop consists of the phonological store and the articulatory rehearsal
system:

The phonological store holds phonological representations for a brief period of time.

The articulatory rehearsal system enables us to covertly or overtly rehearse materials, thus
prolonging their stay in the phonological store.

The model assumes that there are phonological representations of both auditory and visual
materials. That is, when visual material such as printed letters are presented, we may convert
them into phonological representations and thus hold them in the phonological store.

The visuospatial sketchpad temporarily maintains and manipulates visuospatial information.

That is the system that allows us to form visual images, rotate them in our minds, convert
words into images, and so on.

The central executive was initially conceived as a limited capacity pool of general
processing resources. That is, the assumption is that we are limited in the terms of numbers of
things we do at once. How many things we can simultaneously do effectively depends on the
amount of resources that task requires. We can watch TV and drink coffee at the same time,
but it is more difficult to carry on a conversation while doing arithmetic problems in our
head. It is assumed that the central executive exerts executive control – that is, determines
what activities the slave systems should be doing at any given time.

Bilingual language processing

How many lexicons does a bilingual speaker possess?

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Is there a separate store for each language, or just one common store?

In separate-store models, there are separate lexicons for each language. There are connected
at the semantic level. Evidence for separate-store model comes from the finding that the
amount of facilitation gained by repeating a word (a technique called repetition priming) is
much greater and longer lasting within than between languages, although repetition priming
might not be tapping semantic processes.

In common-store models, there is just one lexicon and one semantic memory system, with
words from both languages stored in it and connected directly together. This model is
supported by evidence that semantic priming produces facilitation between languages.

Studies that minimize the role of attentional processing and participants’ strategies, and that
maximize automatic processing (e.g. by masking the stimulus, or by varying the proportion of
related pairs), suggest that equivalent words share an underlying semantic representation that
can mediate priming between the two words.

Most of the evidence now tends to favor the common-store hypothesis. However, early and
late learners show different patterns of cross-language priming, with late learners showing
much less priming, suggesting once again that age-of-acquisition is critical in how bilinguals
represent and access words, with late learners having separate lexicons mediated at the
conceptual level.

Another possibility is that some people use a mixture of common and separate stores. For
example, concrete words, cognates (words in different languages that have the same root and
meaning and which look similar), and culturally similar words act as though they are stored
in common, whereas abstract and other words act as though they are in separate stores.

What happens when a bilingual speaker hears or sees a word? How do they prevent the two
languages from interfering with one another?

Bilingual speakers must have mechanisms in place to prevent interference. In an event-

related potential (ERP) study, bilingual Spanish-Catalan speakers were instructed to press a
button when they saw a word in one of the languages, and to ignore words in the other. The
brain potentials of the participants showed that they were not sensitive to the frequency of the
words in the ignored language, suggesting that the words did not reach a high level of
processing. However, fMRI activation had a lot in common with the way in which we
process nonwords. This pattern of results suggests that speakers use quite low-level
information to block words in the non-target language at a very early stage, such that the

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meanings of these words do not become activated. Further evidence for this low-level
blocking of the non-target language comes from an EEG study of very fluent Italian-
Slovenian bilinguals. The pattern of activation while reading suggested that discrimination
between the two languages is taking place at a very early stage.

Bilingual syntactic processing

There has been much less research on how bilingual people process syntax than there has on
how they process individual words. The issues are much the same: for languages that use
similar sorts of construction, do people store syntactic knowledge separately for each
language, or just once, in a shared store?

A study of Spanish-English bilingual speakers found that a particular syntactic structure in

one language could make it easier to use the same structure in the second language,
supporting the ‘shared syntax’ idea.

Top-down and Bottom-up processes

You are now listening to your lecturer, trying to comprehend what is being said and
remember the main points of the lecture. We can view your language processing as occurring
on a set of levels.

i. At the lowest, the phonological level, you are identifying the phonemes and syllables
that the lecturer is using.

ii. At a higher level, the lexical level, you are using the identification of phonemes and
syllables to retrieve the lexical entries of the words from your semantic memory.

iii. At the next level, the syntactic level, you are organizing the words into constituents
and forming a phrase structure for the sentence.

iv. Finally, at the highest level, the discourse level, you are linking the meaning of a
given sentence with preceding ones and organizing sentences into higher-order units.

Bottom-up processing can be defined as that which proceeds from the lowest level to the
highest level of processing in such a way that all of the lower levels of processing operate
without influence from the higher levels.

Identification of phonemes is not affected by the lexical, syntactic or discourse levels; the
retrieval of words is not affected by syntactic or discourse levels and so on.

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However, we have some reason to doubt that a strict bottom-up model will provide a
comprehensive account of how we understand language.

A top-down processing model states that information at the higher levels may influence
processing at the lower levels.

For example, a sentence context may affect the identification of words within the sentence.
Speaking more intuitively, we may say that a top-down model of processing is one in which
one’s expectations play a significant role.

If you know where a lecturer is going- based on previous experience with the instructor or
maybe even reading the text in advance of the lecture- then you can generate some
expectations regarding what the next point might be. If you are correct, then you are using the
higher levels of processing to facilitate lower levels of processing.

To summarize:

• Bottom-up processing: suggests that we attend to or perceive elements by starting

with the smaller, more fine details of that element and then building upward until we have a
solid representation of it in our minds. For example, the identification of phonemes is not
affected by the lexical, syntactic, or discourse levels; and so on.

• Top-down processing: suggests that information from higher levels may influence
processing at the lower levels. For example, sentence context may affect the identification of
words within that sentence.

Models of bilingualism

The most influential model of bilingualism that attempts to tell a complete story of the
psychological processes involved is the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model
(a development of the original BIA model to include phonological and sublexical levels of
processing; see Dijkstra, van Heuven & Grainger, 1998).

The BIA+ model attempts to bring together all types of evidence concerning the orthographic
processing of two languages, but makes particular use of how we recognize cognates (words
that look the same in the two languages such as ‘silence’ in English and French). In the
model, lexical access is non-language specific in its earliest stages, so words from both
languages are activated, whatever the input. The model comprises a network of nodes at each
level of representation (e.g. words, phonemes), connected together by facilitatory and
inhibitory connections.

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The model is purely bottom-up in the sense that word recognition cannot be affected by the
particular task (e.g. naming, lexical decision) being carried out. The model is characterized
by ‘language’ nodes, which tag representations according to the language which they belong.