Bilingual People Research Articles

"Alguien abrió la puerta:" The phenomenology of bilingual Latinx clients' use of Spanish and English in psychotherapy.

There has been a growing recognition of the role that various aspects of culture play in the theory and practice of psychotherapy. One aspect of culture that has received little attention, however, is language. Specifically, we lack comprehensive understanding of the value bilingual clients find in expressing thoughts, feelings, and experiences in two languages. Research that enhances understanding of the role that bilingualism plays in psychotherapy may thus help improve the quality of services that bilingual clients receive. To this end, we interviewed eight bilingual Latinx people (seven of Mexican descent and one Puerto Rican) between the ages of 20 and 37 about their experience using Spanish and English in psychotherapy. Using descriptive phenomenological analysis, we identified and interpreted 250 meaning units that were grouped into five overarching themes: (a) Enhancing Expression and Understanding, (b) An Affirming Experience, (c) Facilitating Therapeutic Processes, (d) Utility of a Therapist Bilingual Orientation, and (e) Strengthening the Therapeutic Relationship. Findings speak to the value for bilingual Latinx clients of being able to use both of their languages in psychotherapy. Implications for multicultural psychotherapy research and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Equity Leadership Informed by Community Cultural Wealth: Counterstories of Latinx School Administrators

Purpose: The purpose of this article is (a) to analyze how Latinx school administrators draw on their Community Cultural Wealth to inform their leadership for educational equity and (b) to examine how they navigate varying equity initiatives and beliefs in rapidly diversifying districts. Research Method: This study employs Latina/o Critical Race Theory counterstorytelling methodology to explore four Latinx school administrators’ experiences across three districts in the Pacific Northwest. Data sources include semistructured interviews, observations, and local demographic data. Findings: Latinx administrators’ counterstories revealed complex ways their childhoods, educational histories, and current equity leadership were informed by their Community Cultural Wealth as bilingual people of color. They also faced White dominant administrative spaces, where their equity visions often conflicted with district equity initiatives. Sometimes these differences led to tensions with district officials or constrained their advocacy. Conclusion and Implications: Our findings affirm existing research on the potential equity and culturally responsive leadership contributions of Latinx educational leaders. Our article also raises questions to the field about how we understand social justice leadership, and support current and aspiring leaders of color who seek to promote equity in their work. Our analysis brought forth a particular geographical region as a key in influencing our research participants’ experiences. More research is needed to understand how to support and sustain leaders of color in diverse regional contexts, as they seek to combat educational inequities for children and young adults facing similar injustices they faced themselves as students of color.

Evaluating Personal Stroke Narratives from Bilingual Greek-English Immigrants with Aphasia

Objective: For people with aphasia (PWA) and their significant others, narratives are intricately intertwined with quality of life, culture, and social participation. This paper reports stories told by bilingual people with aphasia (bPWA), describing the events or consequences of a stroke on their lives. Patients and Methods: Six participants with chronic mild-moderate anomia (mean age 70 years) spontaneously produced a narrative recounting their personal experience of stroke in their native language (Greek) and in their second language (English). All bPWA had learned English in early adulthood upon migration from Greece to Australia, not through formal teaching but on the job (e.g., in the factory). The bPWA had lived in Australia for 46 years (average) and were less than 4 years post-stroke. Results: Narratives in the two languages underwent quantitative (number of propositions, noun/verb tokens) and qualitative analyses (ratings of coherence, ratings of clarity). Most bPWA produced coherent “tellable” stories despite disruptions in language because of aphasia. Overall, stories were better told (length, complexity of content, temporal-causal sequencing, reference) in Greek – their native language. Conclusion: The results have implications for policy-makers providing health and welfare services to ageing immigrant populations. The findings are also relevant to other countries that have large immigrant populations of stroke survivors.

Bilingual aphasia: Assessing cross-linguistic asymmetries and bilingual advantage in sentence comprehension deficits

People with aphasia frequently have difficulties understanding semantically reversible sentences presented in derived word order. This impairment may be related to the inconsistent processing of morphological information, as well as to difficulties inhibiting the inverse interpretation of the sentence. Studies on bilingual aphasia may contribute to our understanding of these issues by shedding light on i) differences in processing of morphology across languages; ii) enhanced control mechanisms. We studied early Basque-Spanish bilingual speakers with aphasia and monolingual Spanish speakers with aphasia, as well as unimpaired individuals. Using comparable sets of materials across languages, we combined behavioural and eye-tracking methods. Results indicate that i) at the group level, bilingual speakers perform better in Spanish than in Basque, particularly in sentences with Theme-Agent argument order. Individual case analysis shows a pattern of weak dissociation across languages in several participants; ii) bilingual people with aphasia do not outperform monolingual people with aphasia in comprehension accuracy, although gaze data suggests that bilingual speakers exhibit higher inhibition and monitoring abilities.

Materiały do nauki języka angielskiego wydawane od końca XVIII do połowy XX wieku jako źródła badań polsko-angielskich kontaktów językowych. Prolegomena badawcze

The study presents materials for learning English as rarely exploited sources for research into the past of Polish-English linguistic and cultural contacts. The viewing of educational texts allowed to: examine the factors determining the high prestige of English among Poles, observe ways of using elements of Anglo- Saxon culture for educational purposes, indicate the types of interference phenomena possible to analyze in texts written by bilingual people. The observations were carried out in accordance with the assumptions of anthropological linguistics, stressing the relationship between man, language and culture in the study of our ancestors’ language use.

Providing HIV Comprehensive Care to Latino/as Who Inject Drugs: Philadelphia, 2013-2018.

Latino/as who inject drugs have the lowest level of retention in HIV care and the lowest HIV viral suppression rates in the United States. We set up an intervention to provide comprehensive, integrated HIV primary care services to Spanish-speaking and bilingual HIV-positive people who inject drugs of Puerto Rican ancestry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2016, the rate of HIV viral suppression in our intervention (83%) far exceeded the rate for all individuals diagnosed with HIV in Philadelphia (51%).

Zum Status eines mentalen Lexikons bei einem bilingualen Sprecher

On status of mental lexicon of bilingual people. Bilingual people have learnt the second language in a directed way, in institutionalised conditions, achieving linguistic and communicative competence close to competences of the first language, in reception as well as production. Do these people haev a common mental lexicon or two different ones? The author’s research have shown that students posses two separate mental lexicons.

Folklore Life in Multicultural City of Klaipeda (1990-2015)

The fatal social disasters have taken place in the city of Klaipėda by the end of the Second World War. After 1945, very few local bilingual (Lithuanian and German speaking) people could be found in Klaipėda. Almost all of the survivors had moved to Germany to escape the Soviet occupation. Soviet authorities created favourable social conditions for skilled volunteers, who came to deserted city from other regions of Lithuania, and from all over the Soviet Union, to work in Klaipėda port and to restore the entire marine industry in the 1950s–1960s period. The Russian, Belorussian, German, Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, Latvian, Tartar, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and other national minorities have become an integral part of the social and cultural life in contemporary Klaipėda. In the light of these historical facts, the goal of the article is to discuss the possibilities of the most representative national societies to maintain and promote their ethnic roots, traditions and the authentic folklore in the city at present times.

Las connotaciones cognitivas y culturales del bilingüismo

Este estudio está orientado a analizar la asociación existente entre la lengua, las emociones y la cultura en el proceso de aprendizaje de una nueva lengua y el uso de esta. Para probar la validez de la hipótesis de que los bilingües biculturales sienten y experimentan diferencias en sus respectivas lenguas se realiza un estudio bibliográfico de las diferentes teorías interdisciplinarias de investigadores internacionales. Los resultados apuntan a que las imágenes mentales del bilingüe difieren según la lengua en la que se piensa y que existe una gran variedad de experiencias lingüísticas en las personas bilingües, así como un gran número de variables están presentes en la ejecución de diferentes tareas intelectuales. El objetivo fue definir las características extralingüísticas de los bilingües y los ajustes culturales resultantes de la exposición a dos culturas. Se analizó el lenguaje como una herramienta y se concluye determinando la necesidad de desarrollar y seguir procesos especiales en la educación bilingüe, tomando en cuenta las características sicológicas, culturales y sociales, entre otras, del estudiante bilingüe.

Introduction: Multicultural youth vernaculars in Paris and urban France

The papers in this Special Issue present some of the results of theMulticultural London English/Multicultural Paris Frenchproject, supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from October 2010 to December 2014 and by the FrenchAgence Nationale de la Recherche(ANR) from 2010–2012. The project compared language variation and change in multilingual areas of London and Paris, focusing on the language of young people of recent immigrant origin as well as that of young people whose families had lived in London or Paris for many generations. Similar projects in other European cities have documented the emergence of new ways of speaking and rapid language change in the dominant ‘host’ language, which are attributed to the direct and indirect effects of language contact; see, for example, Wiese 2009 on young people's language in Berlin, Quist 2008 on youth language in Copenhagen, and Svendsen and Røyneland 2008 on Norwegian). In London, young children from diverse linguistic backgrounds tend to acquire English in their peer groups at nursery school rather than from their parents, many of whom do not speak English or are in the early stages of learning English. Since their peers speak a wide range of different languages, the only language the young children have in common is English; and since many of their friends are also acquiring English, there is no clear target model, a high tolerance of linguistic variation, and plenty of scope for linguistic innovation. By the time they reach adolescence, young people's English has stabilized, and many innovations have become part of a new London dialect, now known as Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al., 2013). New urban dialects and language practices such as these have been termed ‘multiethnolects’: they contain a variable repertoire of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In multiethnic peer groups, where local children from many different linguistic backgrounds grow up together, the innovative features are used by speakers of all ethnicities, including those of local descent such as, in London, young monolingual English speakers from Cockney families. Nevertheless they tend to be more frequent in the speech of bilingual young people of recent immigrant origin, and by young speakers with highly multiethnic friendship groups (see further Quist 2008 for an account of the use of features associated with a multiethnolect in conjunction with nonlinguistic ‘markers’ of style, such as tastes in music and preferred ways of dressing). Our project aimed to determine whether a similar outcome had occurred in multicultural areas of Paris.

Bilingualism and Access to the Spanish Language by Russian-Romanian Bilinguals

SummaryBilingualism is a complex process involving a variety of characteristics, among which we can distinguish a particular system of a language, as well as the ability to use it in communication. Apart from the mere fact of acquiring the knowledge of a second language, bilingualism also implies the development of specific linguistic structuring and brain functioning different from those of a monolingual individual. This fact is crucial at the time of comprehension and, consequently, learning of a third language and this is why it has been studied by analysing the understanding ability of bilingual informants to refer to a third language without the prior learning of this language and the comparison of the results with those obtained for monolingual individuals presenting each language. Thus, the hypothesis involved considers individuals presenting bilingualism between two different language families (on the example of Russian-Romanian bilingualism) manifesting better understanding of a language from one of the language families they speak natively (on the example of the Spanish language) in comparison with monolingual people presenting one of the languages considered in bilingual individuals (i.e. Russian and Romanian monolinguals). This difference between bilingual and monolingual people in the access to a third language mainly involves the difference in the way of thinking and analysing the acquired linguistic data, resulting in a more effective capacity for understanding. The specification of brain organization and the analysis of linguistic data are due to the creation of specific psycholinguistic strategies by the bilingual individual.

MAINTAINING THE IDENTITY OF BILINGUAL INDIVIDUALS IN MULTICULTURAL/MULTILINGUAL SETTINGS

This paper discusses the ways bilingual people are able to maintain their identity within any multicultural and multilingual environment. As today’s societies have shown to have more people with varied language/cultural backgrounds, it is interesting to learn how the bilinguals understand and identify themselves despite living in a totally different environment. Data in this paper came from a number of multicultural/multilingual settings for comparison purposes. Findings showed that there have been three major factors contributing to maintain the bilinguals’ identity in a diverse environment including language, family, and peer interaction.

DAMPAK BILINGUAL TERHADAP PERKEMBANGAN KOGNITIF ANAK SEKOLAH DASAR

Bilingualism is closely related to the acquisition of a second language. Language acquisition is closely related to how children acquire words, meanings, structures, and pragmatics. It is nothing else related to the processes that occur in the mind and attitude of the child. In the era of globalization, the mastery of foreign languages, especially English as an international language, is mandatory. Currently in Indonesia, English is taught in primary schools and even in early childhood education. This article discusses children's learning, especially in terms of cognitive psychology in learning foreign languages as a second language. The method used is literature study and data collection is analyzed descriptively. It is important to note that the cognitive development of primary school children is appropriate for language learning and there are advantages to learning foreign languages in primary schools. In addition, bilingual people are more profitable than monolingual people. Keywords: Bilingual, Cognitive Development, Impact

WHY DO PEOPLE CODE SWITCH?A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF CHALLENGES FACED IN SOCIAL MEDIA TEXT

In a bilingual or multilingual society people interact with each other using more than one language. Due to various language factors a situation arises which is known as code mixing or code switching. The capacity of code mixing increases with the number of languages learned by the user. It is commonly used in every area whether marketing, advertising, film industry, teaching etc. Nowadays social media has become the strongest platform for communication. There are numerous applications like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Skype and Instagram etc. which are being used for communication. The main focus of paper is on understanding of code mixed social media text in English and Punjabi.

The Relationship of Bilingualism Compared to Monolingualism to the Risk of Cognitive Decline or Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Bilingualism may contribute to cognitive reserve, protect against cognitive decline, and delay the onset of dementia. We systematically reviewed evidence about the effect of bilingualism on subsequent cognitive decline or dementia. We searched electronic databases and references for longitudinal studies comparing cognitive decline in people who were bilingual with those who were monolingual and evaluated study quality. We conducted meta-analyses using random effects models to calculate pooled odds ratio of incident dementia. We included 13/1,156 eligible articles. Meta-analysis of prospective studies of the effects of bilingualism on future dementia gave a combined Odds Ratio of dementia of 0.96 (95% CI 0.74-1.23) in bilingual participants (n = 5,527) compared to monolinguals. Most retrospective studies found that bilingual people were reported to develop symptoms of cognitive decline at a later age than monolingual participants. We did not find that bilingualism protects from cognitive decline or dementia from prospective studies. Retrospective studies are more prone to confounding by education, or cultural differences in presentation to dementia services and are therefore not suited to establishing causative links between risk factors and outcomes.

Estimates of functional cerebral hemispheric differences in monolingual and bilingual people who stutter: Dual-task paradigm

ABSTRACTThe inter-relationship of stuttering and bilingualism to functional cerebral hemispheric processing was examined on a dual-task paradigm. Eighty native German (L1) speakers, half of whom were sequential bilinguals (L2 = English), were recruited. The participants (mean age = 38.9 years) were organised into four different groups according to speech status and language ability: 20 bilinguals who stutter (BWS), 20 monolinguals who stutter (MWS), 20 bilinguals who do not stutter (BWNS), and 20 monolinguals who do not stutter (MWNS). All participants completed a dual-task paradigm involving simultaneous speaking and finger tapping. No performance differences between BWS and BWNS were found. In contrast, MWS showed greater dual-task interference compared to BWS and MWNS, as well as greater right- than left-hand disruption. A prevailing finding was that bilingualism seems to offset deficits in executive functioning associated with stuttering. Cognitive reserve may have been reflected in the present study, resulting in a bilingual advantage.

Dominar dos idiomas vs. bilingüismo. Definiendo un bilingüismo inclusivo y operativo

Este artículo tiene por objeto sentar las bases teóricas para esclarecer el concepto del bilingüismo desde un enfoque cognitivo. Con ello abordaremos las implicaciones de la condición bilingüe y las últimas aportaciones reseñables respecto a su procesamiento del lenguaje. Además recurriremos a las investigaciones más recientes para precisar las competencias derivadas de esta condición y sus limitaciones. Las particularidades que acompañan a este concepto, nos lleva a considerar no sólo las competencias en ambos idiomas, sino al individuo que las utiliza. Asimismo, revisaremos las implicaciones de algunas cualidades atribuidas al bilingüismo y que no pueden utilizarse como categorías absolutas, como sería el caso de dominio idiomático. Como conclusión, la definición de bilingüismo propuesta pretende ―por integradora― ser aplicable tanto al ámbito de quienes educan esta capacidad como al de los profesionales que requieren de las competencias de un bilingüe.

Bilingual people are better at managing dementia.

People who speak two or more languages cope better with the symptoms of dementia, new research suggests.

Interaction and common ground in dementia: Communication across linguistic and cultural diversity in a residential dementia care setting.

Previous research concerning bilingual people with a dementia disease has mainly focused on the importance of sharing a spoken language with caregivers. While acknowledging this, this article addresses the multidimensional character of communication and interaction. As using spoken language is made difficult as a consequence of the dementia disease, this multidimensionality becomes particularly important. The article is based on a qualitative analysis of ethnographic fieldwork at a dementia care facility. It presents ethnographic examples of different communicative forms, with particular focus on bilingual interactions. Interaction is understood as a collective and collaborative activity. The text finds that a shared spoken language is advantageous, but is not the only source of, nor a guarantee for, creating common ground and understanding. Communicative resources other than spoken language are for example body language, embodiment, artefacts and time. Furthermore, forms of communication are not static but develop, change and are created over time. Ability to communicate is thus not something that one has or has not, but is situationally and collaboratively created. To facilitate this, time and familiarity are central resources, and the results indicate the importance of continuity in interpersonal relations.

Estimates of functional cerebral hemispheric differences in monolingual and bilingual people who stutter: Visual hemifield paradigm

ABSTRACTThe relationship between stuttering and bilingualism to functional cerebral hemispheric processing was examined using a visual hemifield paradigm. Eighty native German speakers, half of whom were also proficient speakers of English as a second language (L2), were recruited. The participants were organised into four different groups according to speech status and language ability: 20 monolinguals who stutter, 20 bilinguals who stutter, 20 monolinguals who do not stutter, and 20 bilinguals who do not stutter. All participants completed a task involving selective identification of common objects simultaneously presented to both visual fields. Overall, an LVF advantage was observed across all groups with no significant group differences in regard to hemispheric asymmetry. However, both bilingual groups showed faster reaction times and fewer identification errors than the two monolingual groups. A prevailing finding was that bilingualism seems to offset deficits in executive functioning associated with stuttering. Hence, the results lend support to previous findings implicating the benefits of bilingualism.