A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages ...are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.
Following several decades of research on native language (L1) processing, psycholinguists have more recently begun to investigate how non-native language (L2) speakers comprehend and process language ...in real time. Regarding the traditional assumption that L2 learners have ‘difficulty with grammar’, this new research has revealed some unexpected similarities and differences between L1 and L2 processing. Specifically, it appears that L2 processing can become native-like in some linguistic subdomains (including certain aspects of grammar) but that L1 and L2 processing differences persist in the domain of complex syntax, even in highly proficient L2 speakers. Thus, more subtle linguistic distinctions seem to be required to understand the nature of non-native language processing.
Ulusal dillerde bilimsel iletişim altyapısı kırılgandır ve bu dillerde bilimsel üretim desteklenmelidir. Helsinki Girişimi aracılığı ile tüm dillerde bilimsel üretimi desteklemek amaç edinilmiş ...veliderler, üniversiteler, araştırma kuruluşları, fon sağlayıcılar, kütüphaneler ve araştırmacılar için bir takım öneriler sunulmuştur.
•Attention, fluency and lexical access tested in 193yr. 1 & 4 university students.•Bilinguals (language students) compared with monolinguals (literature students).•Bilingual advantage found on ...selective attention (Y1 and 4) and switching (Y4).•Monolingual advantage detected on letter fluency (Y4).•Late, non-balanced bilingualism has similar cognitive effects as early balanced one.
We present a study examining cognitive functions in late non-balanced bilinguals with different levels of second language proficiency. We examined in two experiments a total of 193 mono- and bilingual university students. We assessed different aspects of attention (sustained, selective and attentional switching), verbal fluency (letter and category) as well as picture–word association as a measure of language proficiency. In Experiment 2 we also compared students in their first/initial (Y1) and fourth/final (Y4) year of either language or literature studies. There were no differences between both groups in category fluency. In selective attention, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in Y1 and this difference remained significant in Y4 despite overall improvement in both groups. Contrasting results were found in attentional switching and letter fluency: while no differences were found in Y1 in both tasks, in Y4 there was an advantage for bilinguals in attentional switching and for monolinguals in letter fluency. We conclude that overall late-acquisition non-balanced bilinguals experience similar cognitive effects as their early-acquisition balanced counterparts. However, different cognitive effects may appear at different stages of adult second language acquisition.
This article sets out to explore the relationships between parental language ideologies, and language use and negotiation in parent-child interaction. The primary dataset is composed of around 10 h ...of audio recordings of everyday interactions of family members (i.e. a Brazilian mother, a Norwegian father, and a 3-year old Norwegian born daughter) during a three-year ethnographically-oriented project undertaken in Norway. A discourse analytical approach with a focus on instances of language negotiation led to the identification of a set of seven parental discourse strategies in the corpus: addressee-bound, code-bound, code rebuttal, filling gaps, rephrase, say 'x', and 'what is-' frame. Results indicate that, contrary to what parents might expect, drawing on discourse strategies that make explicit references to language names might hinder the active use of the child's full linguistic repertoire. Conversely, discourse strategies that only implicitly serve as requests to use a given language can foster continuous multilingual language use. Finally, I suggest that strategies that make explicit references to named languages could be linked to a one-person-one-language-one-nation ideology, and I demonstrate how these strategies help us understand the ways family members navigate their complex national affiliations and talk their multilingual selves into being.
Studies have shown that the use of languages which grammatically associate the future and the present tends to correlate with more future-oriented behavior. We take an experimental approach to go ...beyond correlation. We asked bilingual research participants, people fluent in two languages (12 language pairs) which differ in the way they encode time, to make a set of future-oriented economic decisions. We find that participants addressed in a language in which the present and the future are marked more distinctly tended to value future events less than participants addressed in a language in which the present and the future are similarly marked. In an additional experiment, bilingual research participants (seven language pairs) were asked to choose whether they wish to complete a more enjoyable task first or later (delayed gratification). When addressed in a language in which the present and the future are marked more distinctly, participants tended to prefer immediate gratification more than when addressed in a language in which the present and the future are marked less distinctly. We shed light on the mechanism in a within-person experiment in which bilingual research participants (nine language pairs) were asked to spatially mark the distance between the present and the future. When participants were addressed in a language in which the present and the future are marked more distinctly, they tended to express more precise temporal beliefs compared with when addressed in a language in which the present and the future are marked less distinctly.
Nowadays, pupils bring a variety of languages to school. This study focuses on how school teams perceive the linguistic composition of pupil populations and how this influences their teaching ...practices regarding multilingualism. The mixed-method design combines a multilevel regression analyses (of data from 1255 teachers in 67 schools) with focus group discussions amongst teachers and headmasters in ten schools. Our findings indicate that school teams distinguish between schools with different pupil populations. Differences in the linguistic composition of the pupil population results in different levels of tolerance towards multilingualism. Teachers' perceptions are fed by both negative and positive motivations.
•School team's perceptions of schools depend on schools' linguistic pupil composition.•Tolerating multilingualism is rather rare in Flemish primary schools.•Mixed schools are more tolerant towards multilingualism than other schools.•Positive and negative motivations lead to tolerance of multilingualism.•Tolerance is influenced by the expected proportion of Dutch and teacher control.
The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level ...control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) on a verbal fluency task in which speakers produced members of letter (or phoneme for Chinese) categories first in 1 language and then members of either (a) the same categories or (b) different categories in their other language. Chinese-English bilinguals also named pictures in both languages. Both bilingual groups showed reduced dominant language fluency after producing exemplars from the same categories in the nondominant language, whereas nondominant language production was not influenced by prior production of words from the same categories in the other language. Chinese-English, but not Dutch-English, bilinguals exhibited similar testing order effects for different letter/phoneme categories. In addition, Chinese-English bilinguals who exhibited significant testing order effects in the repeated categories condition of the fluency task exhibited no such effects when naming repeated pictures after a language switch. These results imply multiple levels of inhibitory control in bilingual language production. Testing order effects in the verbal fluency task pinpoint a lexical locus of bilingual control, and the finding of interference effects for some bilinguals even when different categories are tested across languages further implies a whole-language control process, although the ability to exert such global inhibition may only develop for some types of bilinguals.
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