Growing Up Bilingual

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Growing Up Bilingual
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Outline

• Genesee (1989)
• Different approaches to explaining bilingual
  mixing in children.
• Au Glusman (1990)
• Mutual exclusivity and bilingualism.

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Genesee (1989)

• Early Bilingual Development
• One Language or Two?
• The case of bilingual mixing
• Definitions
• The unitary system explanation of mixing
• Alternative explanations

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What is language mixing?

• Interactions between the childs two languages.
  Can be phonological, lexical, phrasal,
  morphological, syntactic, semantic, and
  pragmatic.
• Widespread phenomenon in bilingual development.
• More frequent in early stages.
• Different from code switching.

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Unitary Language System (ULS) The Child is
Confused!

• Language mixing as evidence of an
  undifferentiated phonological, lexical, and
  syntactic systems.
• Swain (1977) Common Storage Model
• Volterra Taeschner (1978) 3-Stage Model

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Insufficient Evidence?

• To support the ULS hypothesis, we must show that
  bilingual children use elements from both
  languages in all linguistic contexts.
• The previous data does not allow for such an
  analysis.
• E.g., Volterra Taeschner report data only in
  one context, with the German-speaking mother.

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Alternative Explanations

• Mixing occurs because of a lack of specific words
  in one language (similar to overextensions).
• Mixing occurs because of an extremely restricted
  use of specific words in one language (similar to
  underextensions).
• Mixing occurs because of structural linguistic
  factors (e.g., one language is simpler)

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Alternative Explanations

• Child mixing is modelled on mixed input.
• Mixing from caregivers
• Mixing in the community (e.g., Spanglish or
  Franglais)
• Some studies suggest that more mixing in the home
  leads to more mixing by the child (e.g., Goodz,
  1989).

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Differentiated-Language Systems

• Evidence of perceptual discrimination between
  languages in infancy.
• Re-examination of language samples suggest that
  children use their languages differentially.
• Language-specific word-order is used correctly by
  French-German bilingual children

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How can we tease apart the different hypotheses?

• Collect data on the functional separation of the
  languages (i.e., language use).
• Data must be collected in different linguistic
  contexts.
• Detailed information on input must be obtained.
• Collect data from the one-word stage and beyond.

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Au and Glusman (1990)

• Mutual Exclusivity and Bilingualism
• Definitions
• Basic method used in the studies
• Findings and conclusions

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Mutual Exclusivity

• Classical problem of induction in word learning.
• Mutual exclusivity, a word-learning bias
• Words pick out mutually exclusive categories
  (each object has a single label).
• Classic study by Markman Watchel (1988).

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Mutual Exclusivity Must be Overcome

• The child must learn that different words can
  pick out categories from different levels of a
  hierarchy (e.g., poodle, dog, animal).
• Bilingual children must learn that different
  words from different languages can refer to the
  same category (e.g., dog, chien).

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General Procedure

• Stimulus
• 4 animals (e.g., 2 seals and 2 lemurs) with
  unusual features (to ensure that they were
  novel).
• Expter 1 taught a novel label (e.g., mido).
• Expter 2 asked for a referent for another label
  (e.g., theri).
• Expter 2 asked whether the first object could be
  a theri and why.

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Procedure Variations

• Children were asked to pick out animals out of a
  set of animals and non-animals.
• Then the original procedure was used.
• Children were asked to pick out dogs out of a set
  of dogs and other animals.
• Then 4 dogs were used (e.g., 2 mutts and 2
  beagles).

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Procedure Variations

• The novel terms used were from Spanish and
  English and the participants were bilingual.
• Original procedure was used.
• Novel words from one language only and with
  bilingual participants.
• Original procedure was used.
• Novels words from different languages, but with
  monolingual participants.
• Original procedure was used.

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Findings

• Adults and 4-year-old children follow the mutual
  exclusivity bias when learning novel nouns when
  there is no evidence contradicting mutual
  exclusivity.
• 4-year-olds follow the bias when 2 words are
  within the same hierarchical level, but not when
  the words are from different levels
  (superordinate/basic/subordinate).

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Findings

• Bilingual adults and 4-year-olds can override the
  bias across languages.
• Monolingual 4-year-olds can also override the
  bias across languages.

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