Bilingualism as a Resource

1
Bilingualism as a Resource

• Jon Herring
• Research Officer
• University of Wales, Bangor

2
Overview of talk

• Introduction and background to the Centre
• Why resource?
• Advantages for language learning
• Pronunciation
• Grammar
• Literacy specifically spelling
• Critical period for language acquisition
• Research findings on cognitive development in
  bilinguals
• Conclusions

3
Introduction About the Centre

• ESRC Centre established January 2007 for 5 years
  
• Economic and Social Sciences Research Council
• Also supported by WAG and HEFCW
• Multi-disciplinary work on bilingualism
• Grouped by method of investigation
• Neuroscience
• Experimental
• Corpus-Based
• Survey and Ethnographic

4
About the Centre (2)?

• International centre attracting overseas
  collaborators to Wales
• Special events Dyslexia conference June 07
• Importance of official title
• The ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism
• in Theory and Practice
• Building networks between
• Theoreticians
• Practitioners
• Two way flow between research and its applications

5
Triple Literacy

• Some assumptions
• Primary School
• Dual language education?
• Some exposure to Welsh
• By end of Y6 students at what level in
• Oral and written Welsh?
• Oral and written English?
• Secondary School
• Students begin 3rd language
• French, German, Spanish?

6
Bilingualism as a resource

• General
• Exposure to two different systems
• Awareness of aspects of language as a phenomenon
  in ways that monolinguals aren't
• arbitrariness of language
• plant (cym) plant (eng)?
• relativity of language
• dysgu but how do you know which one?!
• Not always direct translations or correspondences
  
• Considerable hidden advantage of this

7
Bilingualism as a resource (2)?

• Specific resources for us to work with
• Increased repertoire of sounds
• (phonology)?
• Familiarity with changes to word endings
• (or beginnings of words)?
• (morphology)?
• Coping with different word orders
• (syntax)?

8
Pronunciation Phonology

• Evidence from other language pairs
• Basque-Spanish bilingual learners of English
• /?/ present in Spanish and Basque chorizo
• /ts/ only present in Basque Biarritz
• Bilinguals perform better on English consonant
  clusters
• pits ? /pits/ bilinguals (correct!)?
• /pi?/ monolinguals (pitch)?

9
The consonants of E W

• p b t d k g
• m n ?
• f v ? ð s ? x h
• l ? r r?
• ? (?)?
• w j

10
The consonants of E W

• p b t d k g
• m n ?
• f v ? ð s ? x h
• l ? r r?
• ? (? ) 'll r rh'
• w j

11
Phonology - Consonants

• Welsh bilingual has /x/ and /h/
• (chwech)
• English monolingual has only /h/
• Example from Spanish
• Javier ? /havi??/ English only
• /xavi?r/ English Welsh

12
Phonology Consonants (2)?

• Example from German
• nacht ? /nakt/ English only
• /naxt/ English and Welsh
• Bilinguals have a larger inventory of phonemes
• They can assimilate new sounds and switch between
  systems more easily

13

• été

14
Phonology - Vowels

• e.g. English 'get' /?/ 'gate' /e?/
• Welsh 'pert' /e/ 'pêl' /e/
• Interference in French
• Monolingual English speaker likely to use /e?/ or
  /?/
• Welsh speaker already possesses /e/ sound
• l'été ? /?te?/ for monolingual English speaker
• /ete/ for speaker of Welsh English

15
Phonology Welsh diphthongs

• ew /e?/ llew
• /?e?/
• Spanish eu- euro
• /e?ro/
• Bernabeu (Real Madrid)?
• /bernabe?/
• English learners tend to insert AND delete sounds
• /b?n?be?ju/

16
Grammar

• English regular verbs have few (or no)
  inflections
• I saw we saw
• you saw you saw
• he/she/it saw they saw
• English doesn't differentiate on 2nd person forms
• you see (singular, plural
• no sense of intimacy/formality)?

17
Grammar (2)?

• Welsh (synthetic) forms do use suffixes
• Fe/mi weles i Fe/mi welon ni
• Fe/mi welest di Fe/mi welsoch chi
• Fe/mi welodd o/e/hi Fe/mi welon nhw
• And Welsh has singular/plural distinction for
  you
• welest ti
• welsoch chi

18
Grammar (3)?

• Compare one of the French past tenses
• je voyais nous voyions
• tu voyais vous voyiez
• il/elle voyait ils/elles voyaient
• French tu / vous
• German du / ihr / Sie
• Spanish tú / usted
• vosotros / ustedes

19
Grammar (4)?

• Word order
• SVO or VSO
• Welsh Verb first
• Often in Spanish too Viene el profesor!
• German can be Verb last
• Overall
• Being bilingual extends the structures that you
  know
• Concrete advantage that Welsh is structurally
  similar to other European Modern Languages
• (more so than English...)

20
Spelling - Background

• Types of writing system
• Informal intuitions about differences
• regular irregular phonetic
• Technical terms (typologies)?
• Alphabetic vs. Logographic
• Shallow vs. Deep
• Clear differences between Welsh and English
  systems
• E ltreadgt /rid/ or /r?d/
• W ltdarllengt /dar?en/ (always)?

21
Spelling (2) English

• Ambiguity (depth) in English in both directions
• Sound Letter Example
• /k/ c car, Mac
• /k/ k kill, walk
• /k/ ck pack
• /k/ que plaque

22
Spelling (3)?

• Letter Sound Example
• c /k/ camera, cow
• c /s/ cell, city
• c /k/ Celtic
• cc both access

23
Spelling (4) Welsh

• Eliminates the letter ltkgt from the system
• ltcgt always hard /k/
• ltsgt always /s/
• cf. loanwords
• pensil, parc
• Spelling change?
• cancer vs canser
• (Influence of spelling on pronunciations)?
• NB ae spelling
• caer vs. Saesneg not totally transparent!

24
Spelling (5)?

• So what?
• Advantages for Welsh-English bilinguals
• Exposed to deep (Eng) and shallow (Welsh) writing
  systems
• If you can do English spelling you can do any
  language!
• Awareness that the sound-to-letter matches are
  language specific
• f pronounced /v/ in Welsh
• v pronounced /f/ in German
• w pronounced /v/ in German

25
Learning young

• Timescales
• Mother tongue from birth!
• Bilingual development language delay?
• 2nd Language acquisition in school ? adolescence
• Critical period
• Evidence from same-language dialect modification
• e.g. Family move from Devon to Newcastle
• Cut off point at around age 7
• Sliding scale compare 6 yo, 9 yo and 12 yo

26
Learning young (2)?

• Critical period applies to
• Phonology pronunciation
• Grammatical structures
• Vocabulary (to a lesser extent)?
• Other factors for language acquisition in teens
• Identity very important
• Peer opinions
• Acting vs. self-consciousness

27
Cognitive Development

• Bialystok 2004, 2007
• Cognition? thought, non-verbal skills
• Executive processing
• Attention
• Inhibition
• Monitoring
• Switching

28
Research questions

• Bialystok's hypotheses
• These skills develop earlier in bilingual
  children
• Sustained boost throughout adulthood
• Delayed decline for older bilinguals
• Why?
• They own 2 competing language systems
• Always trying to focus on current language
• BUT other language constantly present as
  distraction
• Bilinguals learn to ignore distraction
• This strengthens cognitive processes outside
  language (like physical muscles!)?
• It is separate from intelligence and knowledge

29
Example of experiment
30
First sorting task
31
Second sorting task
32
Results

• 2 groups, matched for all factors except
  Bilingualism
• Age, gender, language level, IQ etc
• Guess which one did better on the task?
• Bilingual group
• Good news for bilingual speakers
• Further research on older population

33
Conclusions

• Bilingualism offers a resource to language
  learners in Wales
• This includes students who have less fluency in
  2nd lang
• On two levels
• General language awareness
• Specific exposure to sounds and structures that
  help with learning of other MFLs
• Language learning in primary school catches them
  during the critical period
• Further benefits to attention control from
  possessing the two systems