Two Languages in Mind

Abstract

A series of discoveries in the last two decades has changed the way we think about bilingualism and its implications for language and cognition. One is that both languages are always active. The parallel activation of the two languages is thought to give rise to competition that imposes demands on the bilingual to control the language not in use to achieve fluency in the target language. The second is that there are consequences of bilingualism that affect the native as well as the second language. The native language changes in response to second language use. The third is that the consequences of bilingualism are not limited to language but appear to reflect a reorganization of brain networks that hold implications for the ways in which bilinguals negotiate cognitive competition more generally. The focus of recent research on bilingualism has been to understand the relation between these discoveries and the implications they hold for language, cognition, and the brain across the lifespan.

Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link

“…The research we report in this paper also demonstrates the utility of bilingualism as a lens for investigating subtle aspects of language processing that are otherwise difficult or impossible to observe in monolingual speakers (Kroll, Bobb, & Hoshino, 2014; Kroll, Dussias, Bice, & Perrotti, 2014). Bilingualism is of course interesting in its own right, but the present research exemplifies an instance in which it may also help to reveal interactions that characterize the relationship between comprehension and production more broadly.…”

Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain

“…Three discoveries about bilingualism (Kroll et al 2014) have shaped the current research agenda. One is that both languages are always active when bilinguals listen to speech, read words in either language, and plan speech in each of the two languages (e.g., Marian & Spivey 2003, Dijkstra 2005, Kroll et al 2006).…”

Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language

“…The evidence in favor of experience-based models of processing has largely come from studies with monolingual speakers, and predominantly from studies on syntactic ambiguity resolution or the interpretation of subject/object relative clauses. Given the demographic reality that more speakers around the world are bilingual, bilingualism can and should be used as a tool to uncover important aspects of language function that may be obscured or difficult to study when examining the behavior of individuals who speak only one language (see Kroll, Bobb, & Hoshino, 2014). In the work reported here, we use the presence of code-switching in bilingual communities to test the correspondence between production patterns and comprehension difficulty proposed in experience-based models of language processing.…”