A developmental approach to diglossia: Bilectalism on a gradient scale of linguality

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the processing mechanisms that are active during the acquisition process in a way that results in language variation. Within bilingual populations, the notion of “language proximity” is also of key importance for deriving variation. Certain sociolinguistic factors can invest the process of language development and its outcome with an additional layer of complexity that results from the emergence of mesolectal varieties which blur the boundaries of grammatical variants. We report data on the acquisition and development of object clitic placement in the two varieties of Greek spoken in Cyprus, and on performance in executive control tasks by monolingual, bilectal, and bi-/multilingual children. Comparing findings across experiments, the present study identifies the different factors that define “bilectalism” within the greater context of multilingualism, merging sociolinguistic and neurocognitive insights about language variation and how they inform development in diglossic contexts that involve closely related varieties—a study in comparative linguality.</jats:p>

Impact of Diglossia on Word and Non-word Repetition among Language Impaired and Typically Developing Arabic Native Speaking Children

“…The results discussed in the previous section are based on overall scores and do not take into account possible differences in phonological memory that may be associated with linguistic distance, namely availability or not of the linguistic unit in the spoken variety used by children in everyday speech. This question is receiving increasing attention especially within the framework of comparative linguality and effects on language development and metalinguistic skills in bilingual and bilectal children (Rowe and Grohmann, 2013 , 2014 ; Grohmann and Kambanaros, 2016 ; Grohmann et al, 2016 ). Arabic diglossia offers a natural setting for testing this question in developmental language impairment.…”

“…The study of the impact of diglossia, namely the linguistic distance between SpA and StA on language and literacy development is scarce. Yet, it is receiving increasing attention, especially within the framework of comparative linguality and its effect on language development and metalinguistic skills in bilingual and bilectal children (Rowe and Grohmann, 2013 , 2014 ; Grohmann and Kambanaros, 2016 ; Grohmann et al, 2016 ). With focus on literacy development, Saiegh-Haddad and colleagues (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003 , 2004 , 2005 , 2007 ; Saiegh-Haddad et al, 2011 ; Saiegh-Haddad and Schiff, 2016 ; Schiff and Saiegh-Haddad, 2017 ) tested the impact of the linguistic distance between Spoken and Standard Arabic on the development of literacy-related skills in Standard Arabic, including phonological awareness, pseudo word decoding, and word reading.…”

On the Directionality of Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bidialectal Bilingualism

“…For this reason, we consider Brazilians living in Portugal who (seemingly) are speakers of both BP and EP to be (bidialectal) bilinguals, and thus we will refer to BP and EP as languages rather than dialects in this paper. Indeed, examining L2 acquisition and L1 retention in such contexts might be especially illuminating precisely because of the typological relatedness of the languages (see Rowe and Grohmann, 2013 ; Antoniou et al, 2016 ; Grohmann et al, 2016 for similar studies on bilectal Cypriot and Standard Greek speakers).…”

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

“…Cypriot Greek has often been referred to as a dialect of Greek (Contossopoulos, 2000); a variety that is linguistically proximal to Standard Modern Greek (Grohmann and Kambanaros, 2016; Grohmann et al, 2016), which is the official language in the environment our participants acquire language. Although the official language in education and other formal settings is indeed Standard Modern Greek, research has shown the boundaries between the two varieties, Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek, and their distribution across different registers is not straightforward (Grohmann and Leivada, 2012; Tsiplakou et al, 2016).…”