International Journal of Bilingualism

Embodied within every language is a unique universe of meaning. This raises some key questions about the conceptual universes of bilingual persons: What meanings does a bilingual person live with? How does such a person (in contrast with a monolingual person) think and feel? How are their thoughts and emotions related to their two different languages? In order to investigate these questions we need to listen to the subjective experience of bilingual people and, in particular, bilingual writers who have been able to reflect deeply on their personal experience and to articulate their own insights (cf. Besemeres, 2002). We also need to analyze semantic differences between languages and try to link the “soft” subjective experience of bilingual persons with “hard” objective evidence derived from rigorous semantic analysis. Finally, we need to recognize that in order to compare the different meanings that bilingual persons live with, we need a common measure at our disposal. In this paper, I will argue that the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” based on empirically established lexical and grammatical universals (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 1994, 2002) provides such a common measure, and I will try to show how the use of this metalanguage can help us to explore the conceptual worlds of bilingual people more effectively and more revealingly.

In this paper we review recent research on experimental psycholinguistic approaches to the bilingual lexicon. The focus in this work is to understand how it is that lexical access in both comprehension and production is fundamentally nonselective with respective to language, yet bilinguals are able to control the use of their two languages with relatively high accuracy. We first illustrate the nature of the data that support the claims of nonselectivity and then consider some of the factors that may modulate the resulting cross-language competition. These include differences in lexical parsing strategies across languages, in lexical cues that signal one language rather than another, in the ability to allocate cognitive resources, and in the nature of the tasks that initiate spoken production. We argue that the competitive nature of processing across the two languages of the bilingual provides an exquisite model to examine cognitive activity and its control.

This pilot study is based on the assumption that the selection of lexical items reveals the level of conceptual fluency in the target language. This assumption is supported by the model of the Dual Language System of Kecskes and Papp (2000) in which the word is an interface between the conceptual level and lexical level which blends information from both levels. To support the hypothesis the authors collected production data in an immersion school on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain, where the students' L1 is Catalan, L2 is Spanish, and FL is English. All three languages are used as a medium of instruction. Students were asked to read articles in one language and summarize the content in their other language (Catalan text had to be summarized in English, and English text was summarized in Catalan). Data analysis based on length of summary, presence of key words and use of content word equivalents confirmed that there is a direct link between lexical choice and conceptual fluency in the FL.

This paper presents an extended formulation of the Competition Model. The extended model, called the Unified Competition Model, is designed to account for a larger range of phenomena in first and second language acquisition, including bilingualism. As in the classic version of the Competition Model, competition is at the core of a set of non-modular interacting forces. However, the various inputs to competition are now described in terms of six additional subcomponents: arenas, mappings, chunking, storage, codes, and support. Learning is viewed as a resonant process that relies on storage, chunking, and support to acquire new mappings.

This paper discusses links between the conditions of developing child bilingualism and the adult outcomes in semiotic contrast in elicited speech and codeswitching.

Analysis of interaction of children raised as bilinguals shows that from the beginning they can recognize the appropriate language for addressees. When the lexical repertoire is inadequate, borrowing occurs, and codeswitching of longer segments appears before age two. Throughout childhood and adolescence, codeswitching has increasing interactional functions as children's pragmatic skills grow.

Some adult codeswitching relies on semiotic differences implied by language. It is likely that both such codeswitching and the dual selves shown in elicited discourse in different languages are limited to specific sociolinguistic situations and personal histories. These include education in a second language, adult immigration, and frequent contact with a monolingual community.

Previous research has shown that bilingual children perform better than comparable monolinguals on tasks requiring control of attention to inhibit misleading information. The present paper reports a series of studies that traces this processing difference into adulthood and eventually aging. The task used in all groups, from children to older adults, is the Simon task, a measure of stimulus-response incompatibility. The results showed that bilinguals performed better than monolinguals in early childhood, adulthood, and later adulthood. There was no difference in performance between monolinguals and bilinguals who were young adults, specifically university undergraduates. Our interpretation is that performance is at its peak efficiency for that group and bilingualism offers no further boost. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of bilingualism on control of attention and inhibition through the lifespan.