Bilingual adults and children. Who is bilingual? -- How many bilinguals are there? -- Bilingual infants' journey to language separation -- Linguistics and neurolinguistics. Having an accent in one of your languages -- Language loss in adults and children -- Brain injury and bilingualism -- Language use and language processing. The bilingual's languages in interaction -- What a bilingual's languages are used for -- Is language processing in bilinguals selective or nonselective? -- Biculturalism and personality. Bilinguals who are also bicultural -- Change of language, change of personality?.
Summary:
"Every field of study has issues that remain unresolved, and the field of bilingualism is no exception. Over the years, as I was involved in research on bilinguals or writing about them, I would earmark questions that I needed to come back to at some point. Among these were: Who is bilingual given that there is such a discrepancy in definitions? How many bilinguals are there? How do infant bilinguals who acquire both languages simultaneously manage to separate them? Why do some bilinguals have an accent in one of their languages whereas others do not? Can you lose a language completely, and this at any age? Is language processing selective or non selective? Do you really change your personality when you change language? What does it mean to be both bilingual and bicultural? and so on. Of course, answers to these questions have been proposed by scholars over the years but never totally satisfactorily. This is because the evidence is either absent or unclear, new studies have contradicted earlier ones, the underlying theories diverge, and so on. In this book, we will examine eleven unresolved issues and, based on past and recent research, we will give the best explanation we have for them. There will be four parts, each part containing two or three chapters. In Part I, Bilingual adults and children, the first chapter concerns who is bilingual. We will examine how bilinguals and bilingualism have been characterized and how this has changed over time. To help us do so, we will call on surveys, dictionary entries, as well as definitions proposed by language scientists. We will also discuss important characteristics of bilingual people and see how self-report questionnaires deal with them. The second chapter will address the question of how many bilinguals there are. We will examine why it is so difficult to obtain exact figures and will concentrate on a few national censuses that offer sufficient data from which numbers of bilinguals can be estimated. Finally, the third chapter concerns one of the most intriguing phenomena in bilingualism: how do infants who acquire two or more languages simultaneously manage to separate them? Even though their task seems daunting, a number of studies indicate how they start doing so perceptually as well as pragmatically"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.