Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T17:12:00.370Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Bimodal bilingualism reveals mechanisms of cross-language interaction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2015

JUDITH F. KROLL*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
KINSEY BICE
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
*
Address for Correspondence: Judith F. Kroll, 416 Moore Building, Department of Psychology, Center for Language Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802USA[email protected]

Extract

In the recent swell of research on bilingualism and its consequences for the mind and the brain, there has been a warning that we need to remember that not all bilinguals are the same (e.g., Green & Abutalebi, 2013; Kroll & Bialystok, 2013; Luk & Bialystok, 2013). There are bilinguals who acquired two languages in early childhood and have used them continuously throughout their lives, bilinguals who acquired one language early and then switched to another language when they entered school or emigrated from one country to another, and others who only acquired a second language (L2) as an adult. Among these forms of bilingualism there are differences in both the context and amount of time spent in each language and differences in the status of the languages themselves. The L2 may be a majority language, spoken by almost everyone in the environment, or a minority language, spoken only by a few. The native or first language (L1) may also be the dominant language or may have been overtaken by the influence of the L2 given the circumstances imposed by the environment. Likewise, the L1 and L2 may vary in how similar they are structurally, whether they share the same written script, or whether one language is spoken and the other signed.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The writing of this paper was supported in part by NSF Grant OISE-0968369 to J.F. Kroll.

References

Emmorey, K., Giezen, M.R., & Gollan, T.H. Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural implications of bimodal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition. http://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728915000085 Google Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Starr, J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2015). More than use it or lose it: The number-of-speakers effect on heritage language proficiency. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 22 (1), 147155. http://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0649-7 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, D.W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (02), 6781. http://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728998000133 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, D.W., & Abutalebi, J. (2013). Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25 (5), 515530. http://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2013.796377 Google Scholar
Guo, T., Liu, H., Misra, M., & Kroll, J.F. (2011). Local and global inhibition in bilingual word production: fMRI evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals. NeuroImage, 56 (4), 23002309. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.049 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoshino, N., & Kroll, J. F. (2008). Cognate effects in picture naming: Does cross-language activation survive a change of script? Cognition, 106, 501511. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.02.001 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J. F., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25 (5), 497514. http://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2013.799170 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luk, G., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Bilingualism is not a categorical variable: Interaction between language proficiency and usage. Journal of Cognitive Psychology (Hove, England), 25 (5). http://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2013.795574 Google Scholar
Meuter, R. F., & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of memory and language, 40 (1), 2540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thierry, G., & Wu, Y. J. (2007). Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign-language comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 104 (30), 1253012535. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0609927104 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Assche, E., Duyck, W., & Gollan, T.H. (2013). Whole-language and item-specific control in bilingual language production. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39 (6), 17811792. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0032859 Google Scholar
Wodniecka, Z., Bobb, S. C., Szewczyk, J., Zeelenberg, R., Timmer, K., Marzecova, A., Taft, M., Green, D. W., & Kroll, J. F. (under review). Speaking words in one language alone: Priming language selection in bilingual speech.Google Scholar