Context, intersectionality, and resilience: Moving toward a more holistic study of bilingualism in cognitive science.

Abstract

Objective: Bilingual experiences are diverse, vibrant, and multidimensional. Yet, prior research has often homogenized bilingualism and based outcomes upon monolingual norms. Framing monolinguals as the norm distorts the reality of bilingual experiences. To promote a more diverse and inclusive study of bilingualism, we propose a theoretical and methodological paradigm shift. Bilinguals exist in different networks, cultural contexts, and individual and societal settings, all of which may lead to differential cognitive and linguistic outcomes that will be lost if left unexamined. Bilingual interactional contexts occur within extensive environmental and ecological systems, and may lead to different outcomes based on experiences within these systems. We seek to recognize these interactional contexts and how, as researchers, we can strive to better understand the complexities of bilingual populations. Method: We propose incorporating more diverse theoretical frameworks-including raciolinguistics, an intersectional resiliency perspective, and an ecological approach-so that researchers can begin to think about how bilingual experiences are shaped before study participants enter the lab. Included also are methodological considerations that will improve our understanding of bilinguals' intersectional experiences. We offer suggestions for becoming more diverse and inclusive in our research. Conclusion: We encourage scientists to take a more holistic and nuanced approach to understanding how individual and contextual factors affect our study populations. Public Significance StatementBilingual experiences are not uniform. Understanding the diversity of bilingual experiences will contribute to our understanding of human language and cognition.

Bridging people and perspectives: General and language-specific social network structure predict mentalizing across diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

“…Given the inherently social function of language, we see the integration of social network analysis as a natural fit for quantitatively characterizing subtle, interpersonal social dynamics which may impinge on internal cognitive processes. Indeed, the results reported here highlight a need for theories of human cognition to expand beyond cognition without context and incorporate the dynamic, malleable, and socially-gated nature of the human mind (e.g., López et al, 2021; Tiv et al, in press; Vlasceanu et al, 2018). We suggest social network analysis as one useful tool in progressing towards this goal.…”

What Can Cognitive Science Do for People?

“…For example, are racial disparities in cognitive decline with aging (Peterson, Butler, Ehiri, Fain, & Carvajal, 2021) relevant to cognitive science? Cognitive processes always occur in context (López, Luque, & Piña-Watson, 2021) including those contexts is equally important to hypothesized internal mechanisms (Prather, 2021).…”

The map trap: Why and how word learning research should move beyond mapping

“…Yet, multilingual children show equal or enhanced skills when considering other kinds of word knowledge, such as the links between words within and across languages (De Anda & Friend, 2020; Jardak & Byers‐Heinlein, 2019) and sensitivity to the pragmatic context of words (Groba et al, 2018). By relying on referent selection as our primary window into word meanings, we underestimate multilingual children's language skills, leading to a deficit perspective when assessing multilingual word learning trajectories (López et al, 2021).…”