Bilingual Ability Research Articles

Korean Bibimbap mothers’ family language policies (FLPs) for their children’s bilingualism in Australia

Abstract The influential role of parents has long been acknowledged as a key contributor to children’s bilingual development. Parents’ home-based informal efforts to foster children’s bilingual abilities are described as family language policies (FLPs). The important connection between bilingualism and FLP has been established, but to date there are few studies concerning Korean immigrant families in Australia, highlighting their unique cultural values. According to traditional Korean cultural values, mothers play a central role as An-hae (the sun inside) to facilitate their children’s language development (Kim, 2006). This study aimed to create a clearer picture of Korean mothers’ beliefs about bilingualism and their FLPs. The participants were six Korean mothers with their children attending a community language program in Sydney. There are two data sets for this study: a six-weeks’ FLP daily log of each family and a focus group interview. A thematic analysis of these data revealed the richness and specificity of FLPs for bilingual development. This paper concludes with implications for a future research agenda.

‘That’s not how we speak’: interpreting monolingual ideologies in courtrooms

ABSTRACT The paper examines the operation and impact of monolingual ideologies relating to English in interpreter-mediated courtrooms in Australia. This is an issue relevant to courts in many geographical places, especially in Anglophone nations with common law systems. Using recurrent thematic analyses, the paper draws on interviews with 36 court interpreters working in Australia. From the perspective of legal interpreters, the paper explores three specific language ideologies linked to a ‘monolingual mindset’ [Michael Clyne (2005) Australia's Language Potential, UNSW Press.] of courtrooms: accent as a key marker of Australian English according to standard language ideologies; monolingual assumptions that there is only one version of each language; and negative perceptions of the bilingual abilities of court participants from minority backgrounds. The findings illustrate the ‘us-them’ distinction as both a cause and an outcome of the perpetuation of monolingual ideologies, which, in turn, feed into the conditions for the production and reproduction of existing power structures and ideological uses of language, with ramifications for the fairness and justice of legal processes. The paper concludes by highlighting the pervasiveness of monolingual ideologies in courtrooms, the need for multilingual and multicultural training of legal professionals and the relevance of collaboration between interpreters and legal professionals to addressing monolingualism in Australian courtrooms.

The Exploration and Practice of “Mutual Aid” Early Childhood Preschool English Teaching Model

With the advancement of globalization, bilingual and multilingual skills have become an important factor in individual development. Scientific studies show that bilingual children have great advantages over monolingual children in many aspects, while parents, researchers and educators have been paying attention to how to improve the bilingual ability of Chinese-speaking children. Based on the practice of the preschool-children English class of Beijing Jiaotong University, this article proposes a kind of preschool English teaching of “mutual aid” among college teachers, making full use of the professional skills of college English teachers to provide English teaching services for the children of teachers from other departments of the school. This can not only make effective use of the educational resources of colleges, but also ensure the quality of children’s English learning. This provides feasible solutions for effectively integrating college’s educational resources, strengthening mutual assistance between colleges and departments, and providing cost-effective English teaching services.

At the intersection of culture, bilingualism, and mathematics: breaking language norms in a seventh-grade dual-language classroom for biliteracy development

ABSTRACT As it is a common practice in Dual Language Education (DLE) classrooms throughout the United States, language separation tends to be a planning policy that is usually enforced by curriculum designers, school administrators, and bilingual teachers. However, research has shown that DLE teachers and students have the potential of teaching and learning bilingually in their own terms. Using theoretical perspectives from Anthropolitical Linguistics coupled with Ruíz’s seminal work on language as problem, resource, and right; and other socio-cultural frameworks, this paper presents an ethnographic case of a seventh-grade DLE mathematics classroom, and examines how the members of this mathematics community use their bilingual abilities in a flexible way; which in turn, influence the development of mathematics biliteracies. Drawing from a larger ethnographic project, this study shows how the members of a bilingual mathematics community of practice break language norms, which prevail in DLE classrooms, to promote mathematics biliteracies. Findings suggest that using a ‘translanguaging’ approach in DLE classrooms is an effective way for teaching and learning mathematics with a biliteracy approach. Some implications for schools, teachers, and teacher educators are discussed.

Analysis of Language Errors in Speakers Who Are Bilingual Under Quiet and Background Noise Conditions

Purpose This study discusses the ways in which the presence of background noise may adversely affect bilingual students' ability to repeat speech, specifically, whether the presence of background noise increases lexical, grammatical, omission, and other errors on the AzBio Sentence Test. Method Participants consisted of 15 monolingual English (first language) speakers and 41 bilingual (second language [L2]) speakers from Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean language groups, ranging from students who learned English after the age of 4 years to adulthood. Participants completed the AzBio Sentence Test in both quiet and background noise environments. A language analysis was conducted, and errors were classified under categories of lexical, grammatical, omissions, and other. Results The results of this study show that L2 speakers made more lexical, grammatical, omissions, and other errors than first language speakers on the AzBio Sentence Test. In background noise, all bilingual language groups made more errors than monolinguals. Portuguese speakers notably made more omissions than other language groups. This study also shows that participants who were introduced to English at a younger age made fewer errors. Conclusions In conclusion, our results corroborate previous research, indicating that bilingual speakers have more difficulty accurately interpreting speech in the presence of background noise. These findings have implications for classroom instruction considering the statistically higher percentage of omissions made by L2 speakers.

Bilingualism in children with a dual diagnosis of Down syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder

ABSTRACT Research shows that a substantial proportion of children with Down syndrome (DS) also meet the clinical criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Children with this dual diagnosis display a linguistic profile that includes significant language delays and language impairments which often differ from the impairments observed in each developmental disability (DD) separately. Given the challenges observed with language acquisition for children with DS-ASD, concerns might be raised regarding the outcomes and suitability of a bilingual environment for children with this dual diagnosis specifically. The aim of this research was to explore the language profiles of four children with DS-ASD. A multiple case-study approach was employed. Four children with a confirmed DS-ASD diagnosis who had received exposure to two languages (English and Welsh) were assessed on a range of cognitive and linguistic measures. Performance was compared to three control groups; bilinguals with DS, English monolinguals with DS and mental age-matched typically developing bilinguals. Assessments comprised of expressive and receptive language, phonological awareness, working memory and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Considerable variability was found in the cognitive and linguistic profiles of the case-study participants. Children with DS-ASD displayed similar language profiles to that of the bilingual and monolingual children with DS in the areas tested, although performance was generally lower than that of the TD bilingual children. Although substantial variability was found, participants were developing bilingual abilities in a similar trajectory to children with DS in line with the degree of exposure to each language. This research highlights the need to assess bilingual children with complex dual diagnoses with an individualistic approach and carefully consider how to appropriately assess and treat bilingual children within speech and language therapy provisions.

Conversion of Chinese and English Bilingual Children’s Ethnographic Codes Based on Web Bilingual Corpus

Parallel corpus is widely used in machine translation, lexicography, bilingual teaching And so on. Web bilingual resources have the following characteristics: 1) multiple fields. Web The fields covered by the information are very broad, such as bilingual on open curriculum plans.Resources contain resources for the content of each subject. 2) Regularity of page layout. Through After observing a large amount of bilingual data on Wb, I found that the vast majority of sentence pairs are Corresponding and logical locations are adjacent. 3) Noise. Web bilingual pages usually contain large Text content that is not related to bilingual, such as comments, comments, descriptions, etc., here we will Content that is unrelated to a double statement pair is called noise Statistical alignment is a method of high accuracy and efficiency in current alignment methods.one. According to our statistics, traditional statistical length alignment on standard flat text The accuracy and recall rate of the method are both around 90%. On the bilingual page, due to the above characteristics, the accuracy and recall rate of the method drop to About 55%.Much scholarship on code-switching (CS) has focused on the development of children’ bilingual ability (Azlan & Narasuman, 2013). Many of these studies, however, adopt the survey to conduct their study. This study explored how code-switching effects the development of language learning of two Chinese-English bilingual children in the Philippines, employing an ethnographically based approach to observe the participants, which lasted 4 months. The findings of the study revealed that the more progress made in English, the more frequencies children take English as matrix language (ML); both inter-sentential and intra-sentential types are presented as reported in bilinguals; CS is a helpful teaching and learning strategy for low proficiency learners. In view of the results, it is obvious that code-switching is a successful communicative strategy which accounts for the development of bilingualism. It is strongly recommended that we should do more research on the implication of this phenomena has on language acquisition right from childhood[1].

Using language to improve learning: teachers’ and students’ perspectives on the implementation of bilingual education in Ghana

ABSTRACT The decision on which language(s) of instruction to use and how to use them in education is a persistent challenge in the development of quality education in multilingual countries like Ghana. This qualitative study of four public basic schools in the Ashanti region of Ghana explores teachers’ and pupils’ experience of the early-exit transitional education policy in Ghana to understand how it is implemented in the classroom and what its outcomes are for learning. It was discovered that linguistic heterogeneity within classrooms remains a challenge to effective communication despite bilingual instruction. This is exacerbated by the inadequate supply of teaching and learning resources and cognitive underdevelopment of the mother-tongue. The interaction of these factors makes only three years of bilingual instruction insufficient for children to develop adequate bilingual ability to advance intellectually after primary three with English-only instruction. This is more so the case for children at the primary level whose L1 is a marginal/non-dominant language linguistically different from the L1 of their classroom.

Semantic context effects in monolingual and bilingual speakers

Most models of word production converge on the assumption that selecting a specific word to name is a competitive process. Monolingual speakers experience lexical competition in their spoken language (i.e., within-language competition), but bilingual speakers who constantly juggle two sets of lexical items face within- and between-language competition. It has been argued that one of the reasons bilingual speakers perform poorly in linguistic tasks compared to monolinguals is the interference from the non-target language. However, this constant juggling of two languages has also been proposed to lead to better executive control abilities in bilinguals. The aim of this research was to determine the relationship between increased lexical competition as induced by semantic context manipulation in the blocked-cyclic picture naming paradigm, and executive control processes in bilingual and monolingual speakers. We implemented the blocked-cyclic picture naming paradigm to induce increased lexical competition and employed independent executive control tasks to understand its role in reducing increased lexical competition. We also computed delta plots – size of interference effects as a function of naming latencies – to investigate the type of inhibition involved in the blocked-cyclic picture naming paradigm. In this paradigm, objects to be named were presented in close succession, either from the same semantic categories (homogeneous: elephant, lion, deer, tiger, and cat) or different ones (heterogeneous: pear, shoes, lips, saw, and deer). Naming latencies are longer in the homogeneous context due to the heightened activation of competitors, and the difference in latencies between the homogeneous and heterogeneous contexts is referred to as semantic context effect. The participants were 25 young, healthy Bengali-English bilinguals and 25 healthy, age-, gender- and education-matched English monolinguals. All participants performed a blocked-cyclic naming task in English as well as three independent executive control tasks, tapping into their inhibitory control (Stroop task), mental-set shifting (colour-shape switch task), and working memory (backward digit span task). The key group differences were as follows: bilinguals showed less semantic context effect and more semantic facilitation on the first presentation cycle, applied more selective inhibition in both blocked-cyclic picture naming and Stroop tasks as measured by delta plots, showed better inhibitory control (Stroop task) and shifting abilities, but showed comparable working memory span. The correlation findings for both groups were as follows: slope of the slowest delta segment correlated with the magnitude of the semantic context effect in the blocked-cyclic naming task, no correlation between the slope and interference effect in the Stroop task, no correlation between slope of the two tasks, and no correlations between the semantic context effect with any of the measures derived from the independent executive control tasks. This is the first study to establish that bilinguals are less affected by semantic context manipulation and show a reduced interference effect for the longest naming latencies, compared to monolinguals. It also illustrates that even in a challenging linguistic task that heightens lexical competition, bilinguals performed better than monolinguals. This challenges the notion that bilinguals are disadvantaged compared to monolinguals in linguistic tasks, and we conclude that this study provides evidence for the advantage of bilingualism in linguistic tasks where executive control demands are higher. • The semantic context effects between bilinguals and monolinguals were explored on a blocked-cyclic picture naming task. • The type of inhibition was computed using delta plots for the blocked-cyclic picture naming task and Stroop task. • Bilinguals showed smaller semantic context effect, and larger semantic facilitation during first presentation cycle. • Bilinguals applied more selective inhibition in both blocked-cyclic picture naming and Stroop tasks. • The findings challenge the notion that bilinguals are disadvantaged compared to monolinguals in linguistic tasks.

A Comparative Study of Clusterings According to Bilingual Abilities and the Amount of Mother Language Usage of Second Grade Middle School Students

A Comparative Study of Clusterings According to Bilingual Abilities and the Amount of Mother Language Usage of Second Grade Middle School Students

Active Bilingualism in Aging: Balanced Bilingualism Usage and Less Frequent Language Switching Relate to Better Conflict Monitoring and Goal Maintenance Ability.

Experience-related neuroplasticity suggests that bilinguals who actively manage their two languages would develop more efficient neural organization at brain regions related to language control, which also overlap with areas involved in executive control. Our aim was to examine how active bilingualism-manifested as the regular balanced use of two languages and language switching-may be related to the different domains of executive control in highly proficient healthy older adult bilinguals, controlling for age, processing speed, and fluid intelligence. Participants were 76 community-dwelling older adults who reported being physically and mentally healthy and showed no signs of cognitive impairment. They completed a self-report questionnaire on their language background, two computer measures for previously identified covariates (processing speed as measured by two-choice reaction time (RT) task and fluid intelligence as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices), as well as a battery of computerized executive control tasks (Color-shape Task Switching, Stroop, Flanker, and Spatial 2-back task). Regression analyses showed that, even after controlling for age, processing speed, and fluid intelligence, more balanced bilingualism usage and less frequent language switching predicted higher goal maintenance (nonswitch trials RT in Color-shape Task Switching) and conflict monitoring abilities (global RT in Color-shape Task Switching and Flanker task). Results suggest that active bilingualism may provide benefits to maintaining specific executive control abilities in older adult bilinguals against the natural age-related declines.

Unified syntax in the bilingual mind

Are syntactic representations shared across languages, and how might that inform the nature of syntactic computations? To investigate these issues, we presented French-English bilinguals with mixed-language word sequences for 200 ms and asked them to report the identity of one word at a post-cued location. The words either formed an interpretable grammatical sequence via shared syntax (e.g., ses feet sont big – where the French words ses and sont translate into his and are, respectively) or an ungrammatical sequence with the same words (e.g., sont feet ses big). Word identification was significantly greater in the grammatical sequences – a bilingual sentence superiority effect. These results not only provide support for shared syntax, but also reveal a fascinating ability of bilinguals to simultaneously connect words from their two languages through these shared syntactic representations.

Alerting, Orienting, and Executive Control: The Effect of Bilingualism and Age on the Subcomponents of Attention.

Life-long experience of using two or more languages has been shown to enhance cognitive control abilities in young and elderly bilinguals in comparison to their monolingual peers. This advantage has been found to be larger in older adults in comparison to younger adults, suggesting that bilingualism provides advantages in cognitive control abilities. However, studies showing this effect have used a variety of tasks (Simon Task, Stroop task, Flanker Task), each measuring different subcomponents of attention and raising mixed results. At the same time, attention is not a unitary function but comprises of subcomponents which can be distinctively addressed within the Attention Network Test (ANT) (1, 2). The purpose of this work was to examine the neurofunctional correlates of the subcomponents of attention in healthy young and elderly bilinguals taking into account the L2 age of acquisition, language usage, and proficiency. Participants performed an fMRI version of the ANT task, and speed, accuracy, and BOLD data were collected. As expected, results show slower overall response times with increasing age. The ability to take advantage of the warning cues also decreased with age, resulting in reduced alerting and orienting abilities in older adults. fMRI results showed an increase in neurofunctional activity in the frontal and parietal areas in elderly bilinguals when compared to young bilinguals. Furthermore, higher L2 proficiency correlated negatively with activation in frontal area, and that faster RTs correlated negatively with activation in frontal and parietal areas. Such a correlation, especially with L2 proficiency was not present in young bilinguals and provides evidence for a bilingual advantage in the alerting subcomponent of attention that characterizes elderly bilinguals' performance. This study thus provides extra details about the bilingual advantage in the subcomponent of attention, in older bilinguals. Consequently, speaking more than one language impacts cognition and the brain later in life.

Do Changes in Language Context Affect Visual Memory in Bilinguals?

Language is often present when people are encoding visual memories. For bilinguals, this language context can have different forms (i.e., Language A, Language B, or both Language A and B), and can change over the course of events. The current study examined whether a change in language context during a visual event or between visual events affects a bilingual’s ability to remember visual information. English-Spanish bilinguals and control participants encoded three lists of novel shapes amid different task-irrelevant language contexts. Following each list, participants completed a free recall test in which they drew the novel shapes they remembered. Results indicated that a change in language context between events, but not during events, affected visual memory. Specifically, the switch in language context between the second and third event (such as an English context in list 2 switching to a Spanish context in list 3) produced a reliable memory advantage for the English-Spanish bilinguals (relative to the control participants). The results offer preliminary evidence that task-irrelevant language context can influence a bilingual’s ability to remember non-linguistic information, as well as further evidence for context effects and multi-sensory effects in memory.

Relationships Between Home-Related Factors and Bilingual Abilities: A Study of Chinese–English Dual Language Learners from Immigrant, Low-Income Backgrounds

Focusing on 84 Chinese–English dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds, this study investigated which aspects of the home language and literacy environment and which parenting styles may be related to these DLLs’ oral receptive and expressive language abilities in Chinese and English. Key findings were: (1) the frequency of parental book reading was associated with better expressive English in DLLs; (2) parental book reading (whether in English or in a combination of English and Chinese) was linked to better expressive English in DLLs; (3) DLLs whose parents read to them in Chinese (Chinese-dominant) and those whose parents read to them in both Chinese and English (bilingual language-dominant) achieved better receptive Chinese than those whose parents did not read to them at all; (4) DLLs whose parents used both English and Chinese (bilingual language-dominant) when conversing with them achieved better expressive English than those whose parents used exclusively Chinese (Chinese-dominant); and (5) authoritative parenting was associated with better receptive Chinese in DLLs. Interpretations of the findings were discussed in the context of bilingualism.

Likein English andcomo, como que, andlikein Spanish in the speech of Southern Arizona bilinguals

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:This study analyzes the use of like in English and como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of bilinguals from Southern Arizona to assess the possible influence of like in English on its equivalents in Spanish in a language contact situation in which English is the majority language.Design/Methodology/Approach:Drawing on a discourse-pragmatic variationist approach, this study analyzes the use of like in English and its Spanish equivalents in recorded conversations between nine pairs of young Spanish-English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona.Data and Analysis:3389 tokens of like in English and its Spanish equivalents from 18 hours of recorded conversations (9 hours in each language) were analyzed quantitatively. The analysis assesses the relative frequencies of these variants and their syntactic positioning as clause-external discourse markers and clause-internal discourse particles. The independent variables of the analysis were the language of the conversation and the sex and language dominance of the participants.Findings/Conclusions:Contact with English did not appear to radically influence the use of como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of these bilinguals. In the speech of the same bilinguals, like in English was much more frequent and occurred in many more syntactic positions than its Spanish equivalents.Originality:This is the first study of discourse-pragmatic features in contact to analyze the use of discourse markers and discourse particles in both the donor and the recipient language in the speech of the same bilinguals.Significance/Implications:These results contribute to our knowledge of the limited interaction of linguistic repertoires in the speech of bilinguals at the discourse level even in language contact situations with a majority language. They also underline the ability of bilinguals to both understand and reproduce the subtleties of the use of these features in the two languages they speak.

Didáctica de las lenguas y educación bi/plurilingüe: algunos retos para la EIB

Al hilo de los resultados de un reciente estudio sobre las capacidades bilingües en shipibo y español de alumnos escolarizados en una escuela de educación intercultural bilingüe (EIB) de Perú, en este artículo se abordan algunas de los interrogantes que plantea el funcionamiento de la EIB. Se aborda ese tema desde la óptica de las lenguas minorizadas y su lugar en una educación plurilingüe y contrasta los pasos dados por la EIB peruana con la experiencia de revitalización de una lengua minoritaria europea (euskera o vasco) fijándose en los efectos del uso de las lenguas vehiculares en la escuela. Desde un enfoque comunicativo de las lenguas que tiene el bi/plurilingüismo como finalidad, el trabajo incide en los retos que tiene la educación plurilingüe para optimizar los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje de las lenguas en contacto y reflexiona sobre la importancia de evaluar con rigurosidad tanto el desarrollo de las capacidades bilingües de los alumnos como los resultados de un modelo educativo como la EIB y sus efectos en la revitalización lingüística. Concluye subrayando la necesidad de fomentar las actitudes positivas hacia la diversidad lingüística y cultural, así como la de elaborar herramientas didácticas y promover experiencias piloto que contribuyan al desarrollo de la EIB.

Narrative abilities of bilingual children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (SLI): Differentiation and the role of age and input factors

Purpose: The narrative abilities of bilinguals with TD and with DLD/SLI in their English L2 were examined in order to 1) identify the narrative components that differentiate these two groups and 2) determine the role of age and input factors in predicting L2 narrative abilities in each group. Method: Participants were 24 English L2 children with DLD and 63 English L2 children with TD, matched on age (mean = 5; 8) and length of exposure to the L2 (mean = 24 months). Narrative samples were elicited using a story generation task and a parent questionnaire provided age and input variables. Results: Bilinguals with DLD had significantly lower scores for story grammar than their TD peers, but showed similar scores for narrative microstructure components. Length of L2 exposure in school and richness of the L2 environment predicted better narrative abilities for the group with TD but not with DLD. Older age predicted better narrative abilities for the group with DLD but not with TD. Quantity of L2 input/output at home did not predict story grammar or microstructure abilities in either group. Conclusion: Story grammar might differentiate between children with TD and DLD better than microstructure among bilinguals with less exposure to the L2 and when a story generation task is used. Bilinguals with TD make more efficient use of L2 input than bilinguals with DLD.

Perception and Verbalization of Somatic (Bodily) Codes of Culture in the Conditions of Bilingualism and Biculturalism

The article is devoted to the perception and verbalization of somatic (bodily) codes of culture in the conditions of bilingualism and biculturalism. The ability of Komi-Permian bilinguals to identify somatic codes of their culture was revealed. The experiment was conducted in the form of an individual questionnaire in the Komi-Permyak district of the Perm region of the Russian Federation. The experimental material was created using the method of generalized portrait. Two images of real girls (Komi-Permyak and Russian) were superimposed on each other with the help of Face Morph program. “Artificial” person is obtained as a result, which combines somatics representatives of two non-related ethnic groups (Indo-European and Finno-Ugric). Three images (Russian, Komi-Permyak and “artificial” faces) were presented to respondents. It is established that the Komi-Permians recognize faces somatic code well. In the conditions of bilingualism and biculturalism somatic codes of culture in the consciousness of Komi-Perm change more slowly than in Russian. 62% of Komi-Permyaks choose the face of their ethnic group. The Komi-Permians “artificial” person likes least of all (9% of respondents). 29% of the Komi-Perm choose Russian face. Interpretation of the code is a subjective process and often depends on personal perception in the control groups of Russians. Russians choose an “artificial” person is 4 times more often than the Komi-Permians. Choose more often (52%), Komi-Permyatskiy face the Russians, who constantly live in the Permian Komi district. Russians who are not affected by Komi-Permyak culture choose Komi-Permyak face in 42% of cases. Russians Komi-Perm district choose the Russian face 6 times less likely (8,7%) than face of Komi-Permyaks (52%). Komi-Permians choose a Russian face 3 times more often (29%) than the Russians themselves. The analysis of verbal responses showed that the physicality in the minds of the Komi-Perm with mental and moral characteristics, not physical. These characteristics are actual bodily identifiers for the Komi-Permians.

The Effect of Bilingual Ability of Adolescents in Multi-cultural Families on School Life Adaptation: Focusing on mediating effects of self-esteem and self-resilience.

The Effect of Bilingual Ability of Adolescents in Multi-cultural Families on School Life Adaptation: Focusing on mediating effects of self-esteem and self-resilience.