This book is a collection of papers that explores the ways in which bilingual children cope with two language systems. The chapters address issues in linguistics, psychology, and education, that bear on the abilities that bilingual children use to understand language, to perform highly specialized operations with language, and to function in school settings. The chapters provide detailed analyses of how specific problems are solved, how bilingualism influences those solutions, and how the social context affects the process. Finally, the implications of these findings for policy setting and the development of bilingual-education programs are explored.
Language processing in bilingual children
Language processing in bilingual children
Edited by
ELLEN BIALYSTOK Professor, Department of Psychology York University, Ontario
I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 1991 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 Reprinted 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Language processing in bilingual children. 1. Bilingual children. Language skills. Acquisition I. Bialystok, Ellen 404.2019 Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Language processing in bilingual children / edited by Ellen Bialystok. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 37021 3 (hardback) - ISBN 0 521 37918 0 (paperback) 1. Bilingualism in children. 2. Psycholinguistics. 3. Education. Bilingual. I. Bialystock, Ellen. P115.2.L36 1991 404/.2-dc20 90-37707 CIP ISBN 0 521 37918 0 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2003
BS
Contents
List of List of tables List of contributors Preface
figures
page ix x xi xiii
Introduction ELLEN BIALYSTOK
1
Language modules and bilingual processing MICHAEL SHARWOOD SMITH
2
90
Metalinguistic dimensions of bilingual language proficiency ELLEN BIALYSTOK
7
70
Giving formal definitions: a linguistic or metalinguistic skill? CATHERINE E. SNOW, HERLINDA CANCINO, JEANNE DE TEMPLE, a n d SARA SCHLEY
6
49
Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children JIM CUMMINS
5
25
Second-language learning in children: a model of language learning in social context LILY WONG FILLMORE
4
10
Phonological processing in two languages IAN WATSON
3
1
113
Translation skill and metalinguistic awareness in bilinguals MARGUERITE MALAKOFF a n d KENJI HAKUTA
141
Contents 8
Towards an explanatory model of the interaction between bilingualism and cognitive development RAFAEL M. DIAZ a n d CYNTHIA KLINGLER
9
167
Constructive processes in bilingualism and their cognitive growth effects JANICE JOHNSON
193
10 Language, cognition, and education of bilingual children ELLEN BIALYSTOK a n d JIM CUMMINS
222
Index
233
vni
Figures
1.1 2.1 2.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4
Forster's models English six-year-old percentage Igl responses Classic discrimination/identification function Domains of language use Oral uses of language Literate uses of language Metalinguistic uses of language
IX
page 15 42 43 122 125 128 131
Tables
2.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 7.1
7.2
7.3 7.4
Averaged V.O.T. production values page 40 Means on English and French communicative adequacy (C.A.) and conversational features (C.F.) scores 97 Scores in English and French for children with home vs. school exposure to French 99 Effects of status as a bilingual on scores in English and French 100 Within-language correlations for English and French definitions scores 101 Between-language correlations for English and French definitions scores 102 Percentage of responses that were non-literal or literal translations in different translation directions and conditions 156 R2 values obtained through regression predicting translation times for words and sentences on English and Spanish proficiency, and the word-identification (W.I.) task 157 Examples of errors coded in translation tasks 158 Comparison of frequencies of error types in the story162 translation task across subjects from study 1 and study 2
Contributors
Ellen Bialystok Department of Psychology York University, Ontario Herlinda Cancino Graduate School of Education Stanford University Jim Cummins Modern Language Centre Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Cynthia Klingler Universidad de las Americas Centro de Exposiciones y Convenciones, Mexico Marguerite E. Malakoff Department of Psychology Yale University Sara Schley Graduate School of Education Harvard University
Jeanne De Temple Graduate School of Education Harvard University
Michael Sharwood Smith Instituut voor engelse University of Utrecht
Raphael M. Diaz School of Education Stanford University
Catherine E. Snow Graduate School of Education Harvard University
Kenji Hakuta School of Education Stanford University
Ian Watson Phonetics Laboratory University of Oxford
Janice Johnson Department of Psychology York University, Ontario
Lily Wong Fillmore Department of Education University of California, Berkeley
XI
Preface
I have always felt somewhat schizophrenic about two of my academic interests: second-language acquisition and bilingualism on the one hand, and psycholinguistic descriptions of first-language proficiency on the other. It is therefore particularly satisfying to be able to unite them in the production of this volume. The tension between these two interests has not only reflected an inner personal conflict between two of my own areas of research but has signified as well an external conflict between two academic subdisciplines. Editing this volume has resolved much of my personal tension. My hope is that the volume contributes as well to the goal of integrating theory and research across the subdisciplines. Most of the chapters in this volume were originally presented in the invited symposium "Language acquisition and implications for processing in bilingual children" at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in 1987. The symposium was co-chaired by Catherine Snow and myself. I am grateful to Catherine for her easy style of collaboration in that symposium and for her support and assistance in my efforts to publish the proceedings. All of the papers that were presented in that symposium have been completely revised for this volume and several new chapters have been added. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all of the contributors. In my view, these authors are among the finest scholars working in the field. I am also indebted to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council, Canada (N.S.E.R.C.) for providing me with a continuing grant to support my research and writing. Finally, I offer my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my friends, colleagues, students, and family, who supported this project and provided an environment for me in which it was possible to carry it out.
xin
Introduction ELLEN
BIALYSTOK
The study of the cognitive and linguistic achievements of bilingual children has recently become a respectable, even popular, area of inquiry in psychology and education. The issue is not new, but its history as a serious topic of research is somewhat speckled. Researchers have indulged in speculation for some time about the consequences of bilingualism for children's cognitive development, school achievement, linguistic processing, and metalinguistic abilities, but clear theoretical connections based on sound empirical data have been rare. One factor that has made the problem so difficult to study is the enormous diversity that accompanies children's bilingualism. Consider, for example, some of the conditions under which children can become bilingual. Children can learn both languages simultaneously in the home; the second language can be learned through submersion in a foreign culture (and here the relative status of the first and second language becomes critical in determining outcomes); or the second language can be learned through immersion or foreign-language classrooms with the majority-language environment. These differences undermine most attempts to identify precise conditions for second-language acquisition, the psychological factors that accompany bilingualism, and the implication of bilingualism for academic and other achievements. Where research has been attempted, the enterprise has often been rendered uninterpretable by the failure to account for, and sometimes even to acknowledge, the critical differences among these situations. Much of the early research in bilingualism was motivated by educational needs and policy but biased by particular prejudices against bilingualism (and possibly against immigrants in general). About thirty years ago, for example, the general wisdom held that bilingualism was a disorder that could be corrected through ruthless instruction in a standard majority language, pushing out of the inflicted child all traces of the invading language. This remedy was imposed despite the fact that the unwanted language was often the language of the child's home, heritage, and tradition. But the evidence was clear: immigrant children in North American schools were less successful academically than were their monolingual peers, and 1
Ellen Bialystok the only explanation that entered the imaginations of those researchers was that bilingualism was to blame. It came as a surprise, therefore, when anglophone Canadian children in the early 1970s who had been sentenced to French immersion programs and educated entirely or partially through the medium of French did not display this bilingual pathology. Clearly, bilingualism,perse, was not the culprit. There were, of course, some notable exceptions to this early style, such as Leopold's (1939-1949) seminal study of his daughter learning two languages, but these were rare. Most of the details we have about secondlanguage acquisition and the use of two languages in specific contexts, especially educational contexts, come from research paradigms developed in the 1970s. This research marked a departure from the earlier psychometric studies in that it took bilingualism as a phenomenon worthy of scientific interest in its own right and not simply as an educational complication. But like the attitudes that shaped educational policy towards bilingualism in the earlier studies, the research has been characterized by great and sometimes sudden shifts of attention between models that are in some cases antithetical to each other. Three main research approaches were initiated during the 1970s that were responsible for a proliferation of studies that had consequences for understanding language processing by bilingual children. These correspond roughly to linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic perspectives on language. Educational concerns remained relevant, but educational implications were more likely inferred from research undertaken in these other traditions. Although there was considerable work in evaluation studies, such as Canadian French Immersion and American Bilingual Education of various types, for example, these studies were in some ways parasitic on the more basic research that was setting norms of achievement for children learning a second language against which the results of those programs could be compared. Another important research orientation undertaken during that time was the neurolinguistic perspective, but that approach will not be dealt with in the present volume. It is interesting to note, nonetheless, that it was on the basis of a (possibly false) neurolinguistic argument concerning a "critical period" for second-language acquisition that the Canadian French Immersion programs found their strongest validation and subsequently rallied their greatest support (but see Johnson & Newport, 1989, for a revitalization of the critical-period view). The majority of the research relevant to investigations of bilingualism is that focused on the linguistic, or more precisely, applied linguistic perspective. The principal issue is the linguistic documentation of the course of second-language acquisition. Each linguistic description, however, entails different psycholinguistic processes to support that model. The past two decades have witnessed striking changes in the linguistic interpretation
Introduction of second-language acquisition, and correspondingly, in the psychological and educational implications that accompany each interpretation. The prevailing view at the beginning of the 1970s was based on the linguistic approach of "contrastive analysis," developed from Lado's (1957) early work and reported in Linguistics across cultures. On that view, a linguistic comparison of two languages reveals the sources of potential difficulty for the learner by identifying the aspects of the two languages that differ from each other. The psycholinguistic basis of this interpretation was the claim that language learners learned a second language by substituting targetlanguage forms and structures into what they already knew about their first language. Hence, transfer was a complete explanation for secondlanguage learning. This view was abruptly replaced in the 1970s by a claim called "creative construction," a term coined by Dulay and Burt (1975). On their view, there was no place for transfer. One learned a second language by starting all over again using the same processes that had guided first-language acquisition. It is only recently that a more balanced view has emerged, in which the obvious role of transfer is acknowledged but not offered as a complete explanation of second-language learning. A linguistic explanation of second-language learning which has achieved currency recently is based on the Chomskian view of government and binding (Chomsky, 1982). On this view, languages are learned by setting parameters in the "Language Acquisition Device," and second-language learning involves the resetting of some parameters. Transfer is explained as the influence of the parameter settings established for the first language on the values necessary for the second. The bulk of the empirical work undertaken in this linguistic tradition documented the acquisition of specific linguistic features. The fourteen English morphemes made famous by Roger Brown (1973) in his seminal longitudinal study of three children in the early stages of learning English (as a first language) achieved celebrated status. In addition, the journals were full of detailed descriptions of how learners of a particular language X mastered the Y (negation, question formation, pronominalization, past tense, etc.) of language Z. Although some of this work continues to the present, the legacy of the research of the 1970s is a meticulous body of data documenting the course of second-language learning. A second perspective for research in the 1970s was based on sociolinguistic analyses of language learning and use. An important contribution of this approach is that it documented and analyzed the critical contextual facts that distinguish one bilingual situation from another. Studies examining the social context of bilingualism led to such crucial distinctions as high- versus low-status languages, additive versus subtractive bilingualism, full versus partial control of language, and frequent versus infrequent use of the language. All of these factors were shown to be instrumental in
Ellen Bialystok the second-language acquisition process. A strong version of the sociolinguistic perspective led some to attribute the bulk of the explanation of second-language learning to social factors. John Schumann (1978) adopted this view and developed the acculturation model for secondlanguage acquisition in which he argued that social factors such as integration into the community and personal feelings of assimilation provide an explanation of second-language learning. A third type of research on bilingualism established in the 1970s was addressed to the perennial problem of why some people learned a second language more easily and more thoroughly than others. To this end, many studies of the characteristics of good and poor language learners were undertaken, assessing the role of such variables as aptitude, motivation, personality style, form of instruction, and the like on the ultimate level of proficiency achieved by the language learner. One particularly thorough example of a study of this type was conducted by Naiman et al. (1978). While no single profile of the "good language learner" ever emerged, one could no longer ignore such individual differences in making general statements about second-language learning. If nothing else, second-language learning was complex in ways that seemed irrelevant to first-language acquisition, and the contribution of the research on that problem was at least to identify some of the individual difference factors that conspired to produce that complexity. These three perspectives constitute the research heritage for the study of bilingual children. There are, however, two obvious incongruities between the problems to which this research was addressed and the problems presented by the study of bilingual children. First is the problem of age. Although some of the studies carried out since the 1970s which contributed to the existing data base examined the second-language acquisition of children, the vast majority were studies of adult second-language learners. It is still an unsolved empirical question whether or not the course of language acquisition is the same for conceptually immature children as it is for adults. The most widespread commonsense belief about secondlanguage learning, namely that children are more successful than adults, has been severely challenged with both theoretical and empirical arguments (e.g. Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978) although new evidence has begun to emerge again in support of the critical-period view (Johnson & Newport, 1989). A correct description of the similarities and differences between child and adult second-language acquisition is still pending. Second is the problem of effect. What is the consequence of having learned another language? What are the implications for the child's cognitive, linguistic, social, and educational experiences? It is primarily to this second issue that the present volume is addressed. Two recent changes in the field of language research have made the direct and explicit study of the linguistic and cognitive development of
Introduction bilingual children a timely issue. First is the "legitimization" of secondlanguage studies into mainstream linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing. Second is the shift in emphasis in psycholinguistic research from product descriptions to process models. For a long time, there was a pervasive attitude among researchers studying language acquisition that the main problem to be solved, the dominant issue, was first-language acquisition. Second-language acquisition was perhaps a variation on a theme, but of far less interest and relevance than the child's acquisition of a first language. That view, in the context of the times, may have been correct. It may be that no serious attention could be paid to something that was considered as a twist on a theme when the theme itself remained such a mystery. But we now know a great deal about first-language acquisition, and the insight that is occurring to some researchers is that we could know a great deal more if we included information about second-language learning into our theorizing. An interesting development in this regard is the completion model of language processing developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (e.g. MacWhinney, 1987). By taking seriously data about the way in which adults process a second language, they have developed a model which they offer as a valid description of language processing in general. In this way, research with second-language learners has contributed to an advance in mainstream psycholinguistic theorizing. Such developments enhance the status of studies of bilingual speakers. The second change is that research in children's cognitive and linguistic development has shifted from product descriptions of their accomplishments to process analyses of the causes of development. It is only about twenty-five years since psychology shed the shackles of behaviorism and allowed researchers to indulge in speculations and theories that included constructs such as "mind." In some current models, for example those of Robbie Case (1985), Robert Sternberg (1984), and Robert Siegler (1984), processing is attributed to hierarchically related "schemes" that the child develops as a function of specific experiences. Throughout development, the schemes continually become elaborated and restructured. These schemes, then, have the responsibility for guiding and determining the child's performance on specific tasks. Some of these models attribute excessive autonomy to such schemes (Sternberg may be a case in point) and leaves much of the important work in the hands (or mind) of some hypothetical homunculus. The important point, however, is that children's experiences determine critical aspects of their cognitive organization, and that organization is instrumental in influencing the kinds of intellectual achievements that children can attain. In these terms, it is not implausible that bilingualism is an experience that has major consequences for children's intellectual development.
Ellen Bialystok In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged in which process-oriented analyses of these types are applied to specific problems in children's linguistic development. An important part of this interest are the studies of children as they develop the ability to deal with complex uses of language, in particular the literacy skills of reading and writing. These skills have been shown to depend on specific types of language processing and the availability of a set of metalinguistic insights. Skilled readers, for example, are different from less skilled readers because they have more efficient executive schemes for processing language and they have a more elaborated understanding of language structure. The origins of early reading have been traced to types of language processing in which children can pay attention to such features of language as rhyme, alliteration, and paraphrase. Writing, too, is a complex process involving attention to specific linguistic features and integration of those features into a higher-order plan or scheme. More recently, considerable attention has been devoted to uncovering the metalinguistic skills developed by children in the early years, and the ways in which those skills interact with the child's progress in learning to read and write. In all these models, the accomplishments of reading and writing that had formerly been investigated as product descriptions (e.g. what the stages are in learning to read, what features of text make learning to read easier, what errors children make in early reading and writing) are recast as issues requiring explanation. These process models are invariably integrative, incorporating many aspects of children's competence. The contribution that the child's bilingualism might make to such linguistic processes has barely been investigated. Some research explicitly addressed to the influence that bilingualism might have on cognitive and linguistic development has in fact been undertaken throughout the decades. The early studies in the 1950s and 1960s which argued for cognitive deficit to be the consequence of bilingualism can be largely dismissed on methodological grounds. (An excellent review of these studies is presented by Kenji Hakuta (1986) in Mirror of language.) In contrast, a number of studies in the 1970s linked certain cognitive and linguistic advantages to bilingualism. Many of these studies, however, seemed to be overenthusiastic in their effort to identify positive effects for bilingualism, in spite of the fact that results were sometimes equivocal and sometimes even negative. But the optimism was a necessary political tool: only forceful argument and convincing data could dethrone the predominant view of bilingualism as a liability. The current theoretical and political ethos permits a sober and balanced examination of the influence of bilingualism on children's development. Theoretically, the models and research paradigms from which we study children's development are now sufficiently sophisticated that the complex and elusive issues involved in children's bilingualism may be addressed.
Introduction Politically, it seems less necessary to "prove" the acceptability of bilingualism for children. We are free, that is, to discover that being bilingual may in fact bring no special cognitive or linguistic benefit to children, and that finding will not threaten the existence of children in our educational system who happen to be bilingual. The chapters in this volume report research in this new tradition which examines basic processes in language acquisition and use for children who are bilingual. The ultimate aim is to develop a cognitive description for the acquisition and mastery of a second language, and to determine implications of becoming bilingual on children's language processing and language awareness. The relevant questions are whether or not bilingualism affects the way in which children process language and the insights which they subsequently derive about the structure of language. Basic questions such as the relation between first- and second-language acquisition have long been entertained, but only within these recent process models can they be properly addressed. How is the second language acquired? What role is given to the child's first language during that process? And how are the child's cognitive and linguistic resources modified (or not) as a result of having mastered two linguistic systems? The focus throughout is on the child's cognitive resources and their role in the child's development of specific types of intentional language-processing. In all cases, too, the contextual factors that define the bilingual situation are addressed. It is our belief that intensive study of the cognitive and linguistic development of bilingual children is essential, not only because of our obligation to understand the language development of those children who are bilingual, but also because of the incredibly rich source of knowledge gained from this understanding that we can apply to our study of first-language acquisition and cognitive development. The volume begins with a linguistic description of language processing that can accommodate processing in two languages. This chapter, by Sharwood Smith, sets out a clear statement of the linguistic resources recruited in ordinary language use (such as conversation) and points out how those resources might be organized for bilingual speakers (since his focus is not exclusively on children). The second chapter by Watson examines one aspect of linguistic competence, phonological ability, and reports empirical evidence for the course of the phonological development of bilingual children. These data are used to evaluate alternative models of phonological processing. The third chapter addresses acquisition. Wong Fillmore bases her discussion of the acquisition of a second language by young children on the incredibly rich longitudinal data base she and her colleagues have collected studying the language acquisition of immigrant children. She presents a model for acquisition that has three components - social, linguistic, and cognitive - and demonstrates the essential role each plays
Ellen Bialystok in a description of language acquisition. In the fourth chapter, Cummins applies one of the distinctions made by Wong Fillmore concerning the difference between individual and environmental sources of influence in acquiring language proficiency to the problem of how the first language influences the development of proficiency in the second language. He adds a further distinction between contextualized and decontextualized uses of language and demonstrates that the greatest influence is for decontextualized school-related uses of language. Snow, Cancino, De Temple, and Schley pursue this distinction in their investigation of the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to provide definitions, an important linguistic task that is quintessential^ a "school problem." Substantiating Cummins' claims, children perform comparably on this task in both their first and second languages. Bilingualism seems not to influence performance. Other kinds of language tasks do, however, show variation in performance as a function of bilingualism. These are reviewed in the sixth chapter by Bialystok. Malakoff and Hakuta are interested in the problem of translation, clearly a linguistic task available only to children who are bilingual. They ask how children do translations and what that ability reveals about their linguistic organization and processing. Diaz and Klingler, in the eighth chapter, readdress the old problem of the effect of bilingualism on intelligence. They demonstrate that more precision in the description of the child's bilingualism is necessary to make much progress with this question. They also bring a new perspective to the issue by interpreting the question from a Vygotskian viewpoint. An attempt to provide some explanatory constructs for these effects of bilingualism on cognitive growth is proposed by Johnson in the ninth chapter. A final chapter by Bialystok and Cummins summarizes the main findings concerning the language processing and language awareness of bilingual children and assesses the contribution of the last decade of research. Three themes run through these papers. First, most of the papers include reports of original research, but the emphasis in each case is on the larger issues of language processing that are relevant for bilingual children. Thus the data are used to support the more general enterprise of theory building. Second, the linguistic process or accomplishment examined in each case is in the domain of what one might call "intentional language use." These are the aspects of language that impact most directly on cognition - using language in the service of specific goals, as in reading or understanding metaphors, reflecting on language as a structured body of knowledge, as in developing linguistic awareness, and manipulating language to achieve specific ends, as in writing and translating. Third, the approach in all cases is on processing. The tacit assumption is that we are beyond the stage of inquiry in the field in which product descriptions will advance our knowledge. Further progress depends on understanding how the system works, 8
Introduction how it changes, and how it adapts. These questions can only be answered by examining mental processes.
References Brown, R. 1973. A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Case, R. 1985. Intellectual development: from birth to adulthood. New York: Academic Press. Chomsky, N. 1982. Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Dulay, H. & M. Burt 1975. Creative construction in second language learning. In M. Burt & H. Dulay (eds.), New directions in second language learning, teaching and bilingual education. Washington, DC: TESOL. Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of language: the debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books. Johnson J. S. & E. L. Newport 1989. Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60-99. Lado, R. 1957. Linguistics across cultures: applied linguistics for language teachers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Leopold, W. F. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. MacWhinney, B. 1987. Applying the competition model to bilingualism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 315-327. Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. H. Stern & A. Todesco. 1978. The good language learner. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Schumann, J. 1978. The acculturation model for second language acquisition. In R. Gingras (ed.), Second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Siegler, R. S. 1984. Mechanisms of cognitive growth: variation and selection. In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), Mechanisms of cognitive development. New York: Freeman. Snow, C. E. & M. Hoefnagel-Hohle 1978. The critical period for language acquisition: evidence from second language learning. Child Development, 49, 1114-1128. Sternberg, R. J. 1984. Mechanisms of cognitive development. A componential approach. In R. J. Sternberg (ed.). Mechanisms of cognitive development. New York: Freeman.
1
Language modules and bilingual processing MICHAEL SHARWOOD
SMITH
This chapter deals with the potential contribution of recent linguistic and psycholinguistic research to our understanding of the ways in which bilinguals (and multilinguals) process language data. The term "processing" takes on two meanings here, a developmental meaning and an on-line use meaning. Firstly, in the building up of knowledge representations (development), learners' acquisitional mechanisms need to process relevant linguistic information coming in from the environment. This is developmental processing. However, once knowledge representations become available to learners as users of their knowledge then those knowledge representations in turn need to be processed for the various uses to which learner/users want to put their language system at given moments in time. This on-line control may be called knowledge processing. In considering various aspects of developmental processing and knowledge processing in bilinguals, extrapolations will be made from some current views on how language is represented in the mind of the learner/user and reference will be made to theoretical notions from sister disciplines which have not, at least not until very recently, been developed and demonstrated in a second language context. The theoretical status of various different kinds of linguistic knowledge will be considered, ranging from the more implicit knowledge inherent in the Chomskyan notion of linguistic competence through pragmatic knowledge, to characteristically explicit knowledge about language that is freely accessible to introspection, namely metaknowledge. At each stage, the focus will be on the implications for research into bi lingual ism. The underlying theme in discussion will be the application of a "modular" approach to bilingual processing. If knowledge in general, as Fodor (1983) has argued, and even language knowledge itself, is compartmentalized into modules containing fundamentally different types of mental representation, how might this affect our understanding of how the bilingual mind stores and manipulates information relating to the different language systems available to it? Both sequential and simultaneous bilingualism will be discussed. For the former, the second language (L2) is acquired after the 10
Language modules and bilingual processing first (LI); for the latter, the child grows up acquiring two or more languages at the same time.
Modularity in the representation of knowledge The perspective to be outlined crucially involves the theoretical notion of modularity (basically following Fodor, 1983; see also Jackendoff, 1987), whereby an individual's knowledge is viewed not as a single entity but as one which involves a number of separate compartments or modules. Some of these modules are highly independent systems, the prime example being the mental grammar which lies at the heart of human linguistic ability. The precise nature of modular structure in the mind is a matter of theoretical debate. However, the advantages of viewing the mind as a modular entity are becoming clearer as the debate ensues and inevitably touches upon the interpretation of bilingual behavior. Grammatical competence, in Fodor (1983), is taken to be different in kind from more generalized "encyclopedic knowledge" such as our knowledge of history and physics, as well as our idiosyncratic knowledge of events, people and places. This important qualitative difference has to do with the fact that the grammatical processing mechanisms (which is what Fodor is principally interested in here) handle the processing of relevant sensory information independently, that is, without any help from the other knowledge systems. These grammatical mechanisms must then format that information for subsequent integration into a more global act of language comprehension or production. Moreover this processing is "rapid and mandatory," that is, it is essentially a reflex response to the input. The standard example of this sort of processing is vision, where people cannot decide to not see what is in front of them unless they actually block their field of vision by closing their eyes or turning away. In the same way, one cannot be exposed to comprehensible speech without automatically comprehending it. As has been discussed at length by Chomsky, with whom Fodor's ideas are very broadly compatible, the actual development of mental grammars, is also independent of general cognitive growth. These grammars develop by means of acquisitional mechanisms that are to a great degree constrained by principles that are biologically endowed and not available via experience. In this way, the child, in interacting with primary language data (the input) solves "Plato's problem" and comes to know much more about the grammatical structure of the target language than it has evidence for (Chomsky, 1980). This process is not at all akin to the processes involved in developing knowledge about, say, the history of the planet, or how the local library works, where development, unlike the acquisition of grammatical structure 11
Michael Sharwood Smith of a given language, can be explained by general inductive principles working on the much richer relevant evidence that is typically available via experience. This crucially involves "negative evidence," that is being continually informed about what is not possible or not permitted in the system being learned. By way of contrast, language acquisition, at least firstlanguage acquisition and quite possibly, despite appearances, a fair amount of second-language acquisition (see White, 1987), has to proceed, where the grammar (basically syntax and phonology) is concerned, with little or no negative evidence to speak of (see Lasnik, 1982, for qualifications of this position). Children do not go to school to learn to speak their mother tongue; second-language learners (who have previously become native speakers of a first language) sometimes do but the instruction they get can be fragmentary, not structured according to known principles of language acquisition and as a result, possibly very misleading, and devoid of constant and consistent individualized corrective feedback. Fodor (1983) discusses the use of grammatical knowledge at a given moment in time. Grammatical performance involves a system like the visual system which is specifically geared to processing particular kinds of information, that is grammatical information and none other than that, coming in from the environment. This system processes input automatically without deliberate activation: if someone addresses us, we cannot choose not to interpret the utterance except, as mentioned above, by blocking off the sound wave. The speech signal, once perceived, triggers an automatic response. We begin interpreting it in the same way as we automatically interpret familiar visual patterns that we perceive by means of our eyes. And, in order to speak ourselves, we normally have to simply think about what we have to say and not about the fine phonological and grammatical detail of the shapes our utterances will have to take. In this way, grammatical utterances (give or take a few slips of the tongue) are formed automatically without any conscious manipulation on our part. In fact we have no choice since we have access to only a few of our utterance-formation mechanisms. Encyclopedic knowledge is a type of "knowing about" knowledge which is more amenable to deliberate conscious control by the individual. A native speaker knows his or her language but without knowing much about it. One can deliberately select an area of encyclopedic knowledge, and reflect upon it, analyze it, test its validity, revise it and consciously learn more. In Fodor's terms, whose conception of modularity is actually much less fine-grained than others who have discussed this issue subsequently (see, in particular, Jackendoff, 1987), such knowledge falls more directly within the domain of the central processor. If encyclopedic knowledge itself can be seen as compartmentalized in some way, the thrust of the argument is that the basic building blocks are the same: the knowledge is developed 12
Language modules and bilingual processing with the same learning mechanisms and it is used in the same way. Linguistic knowledge itself, in the sense used above (as subconscious and relatively inaccessible to introspection), can also be seen as internally modular, although Fodor with his focus on knowledge processing does not discuss this. Certain aspects of that knowledge may also fall into this more general category, for example the choice of words and style to suit situations and particular speaker intentions in the production of utterances as also a whole range of morphological phenomena specific to any particular language. This implies that some parts of morphological, lexical, and pragmatic knowledge may not be part of the grammar module per se, although they are certainly part of what most of us mean by "language" (see Foster, 1985). If some aspects of linguistic knowledge share the same type of mental representation with other more general kinds of knowledge, this also means that they can be acquired and used following more general cognitive principles involving, presumably, inductive learning and some conscious manipulation during actual performance. This, again, would appear to be particularly true of metalinguistic activities. Our reflections on the formal properties of language (grammar or other aspects of a language) are most vividly represented by the case of a linguist trying to work out the rules and principles behind a particular natural language. Typically, the better we get at inductive learning and conscious manipulation of ideas, the better able we are to develop and use linguistic knowledge that falls under this category. By the same token, our ability to develop other kinds of linguistic knowledge will not reflect the same improvements. What we were good at when acquiring our first language as young, cognitively immature learners, we will be perhaps just as good at later, but certainly no better by virtue of being better at reasoning coherently. Research will no doubt cast much more light on this issue by demonstrating the clear influence of general learning principles in specific areas of the language, especially the beneficial effects of corrective feedback. It already seems intuitively reasonable to suppose that corrective feedback will be readily available with regard to the idiosyncratic use of the lexicon, where the learner refers to objects or concepts with the "wrong" words (as in "that's a pretty cat" while pointing at an ugly dog) or uses the referentially appropriate words but violates the pragmatic norms of the community (as in "Hi there, Your Highnesses" or "Salutations, guys"). To sum up, it seems that the learning conditions for different aspects of language acquisition are radically different in kind. The fact that the immature and uninstructed child does so well suggests that the learning mechanisms are specialized not only in contrast to non-linguistic learning mechanisms but also internally. In some areas, notably syntax, corrective feedback is not required and may well not be processed even when it is 13
Michael Sharwood Smith available. In other linguistic areas, it may be processed and lead to a revision of knowledge. In other words, modular treatment is also called for when developing a theory to account for language behavior itself. Modularity in on-line processing. If processing in the actual development of linguistic knowledge over time appears to require modular explanations, it is not clear that this should also be true for processing in the on-line language use sense of the word. Our hypotheses about the knowledge modules may or may not be of relevance with respect to the processing "machinery" available to access this knowledge and manipulate it actually using language on a given occasion. This aspect of language ability will be called the processing-control dimension ("control" for short): how knowledge is controlled by the performance mechanisms (see Bialystok & Sharwood Smith, 1985, for instance, for an application of this idea to second-language acquisition theory). In principle, the on-line control of qualitatively different kinds of knowledge could be non-modular, that is there could be uniform access and manipulation across different knowledge modules. Modularity in this sense would be a matter of knowledge representation, not knowledge use. And if processing control is modular, then the modules do not have, again in principle, to be the same as the knowledge modules. Recent thinking on language processing has, in fact, employed the notion of modularity. Frazier (1988) in particular argues that the evidence to date strongly suggests that language processing should be seen in terms of autonomous modules associated with but not necessarily identical with the modules defined in current generative theory, that is, modules within the grammar. This means that the speech signal is analyzed by separate autonomous modules that cannot bring information to bear from other areas to disambiguate the message on-line. In other words, the evidence suggests that until all the processing modules have done their work on the input, there is a certain level of "garden-pathing" leading to alternative-candidate interpretations being available at given points in the process. To this extent, Frazier's approach follows the seminal paper on processing by Forster (1979) in which the speech signal is analyzed in a manner as represented in figure 1.1. A crucial feature of Forster's model are the three linearly ordered processing stages represented vertically in figure 1.1, that is the phonological, syntactic, and message processors respectively. Each processor operates independently without reference to information from outside except the input from the preceding stage. Where there is ambiguity, then the particular processor currently operating must assign alternative-candidate analyses. These ambiguities may be resolved at a later stage. For example, the syntactic processor can reject, say, one of two phonologically acceptable 14
Language modules and bilingual processing message processor
general problem solver
world knowledge
i[
syntactic processor
lexicon
j
phonological processor
Figure 1.1 Forster's models
candidates (Do you like to roam/*Do you like to Rome). The message processor can reject anomalous alternatives passed on from the syntactic processor and real world knowledge can select the most suitable of any semantically well-formed alternatives passed on from the message processor. Frazier (1988) details the empirical evidence that supports the Forster model, showing how, for example, people (reading) can be temporarily garden-pathed (led towards an incorrect interpretation) even where preceding sentences contain disambiguating information to prevent this happening (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; see Frazier, 1988). As Frazier (1988) points out, research adopting quite different views of processing has strongly suggested, in contradistinction to what is predicted by Forster's model, a rapid use of different information types in some stage or other of processing. Frazier's model is an attempt to combine this idea of rapid use of different information types (phonological, syntactic, etc.) with what she sees as a strength of the Forster model, namely the autonomous, encapsulated processors. Furthermore, she tries to exploit insights into the structure of the grammar provided by recent generative linguistic research. In her autonomy model, she departs from Forster in that she claims that the evidence shows that processing cannot be serial, that is, going from one module to the next. Serial processing would require the system to generate an enormous number of alternative interpretations and hold them in store until everything was resolved in the last stage. Rather, she says, processing is done in modular fashion with structure assigned by separate subsystems with regard to very specific and welldefined principles. Hence, even within the domain of syntax itself, a string (linguistic input) can be individually analyzed with regard to, respectively, its phrase structure and the extent to which it obeys case theory (constraints on how case is assigned), binding theory (e.g. how anaphors are linked 15
Michael Sharwood Smith to given antecedents), the theta principle (roughly assigning one and one theme only to given arguments) and so on. Direct reference can thus be made to those highly constrained subsystems which, in current Chomsky an theory, apply in different combinations to produce a wide variety of natural grammars and never any humanly impossible grammars. Language processing in Frazier's model can be concurrent since the analysis of the string by one processing module is never going to conflict with the analysis of another; presumably some phonological preanalysis has to be done first in order to present candidates for concurrent processing. After this, input is presented simultaneously to different processors for analysis. A simple analogy would be the identification of a particular object, say an egg in a bed of rocks, whereby one would not first check the egg shape, using a "shape processor" against the object present in the visual field, and then the color, and then the size, using a "size processor," but rather all these parameters would be checked out concurrently - the various processors would get to work on the basic visual input provided by the first stages of processing at the same time. A final decision about the interpretation of the visual signals would thus be arrived at much more quickly. It is instructive to note, in passing, that conscious problem-solving does seem to be serial, and consequently slow and laborious and that the conscious meta-analysis of linguistic information, like a serial analysis of the visual field is also slow and laborious.
Implications for bilingual processing
Knowledge implications In simultaneous bilingual acquisition, bilingual developmental processing, that is, processing input for the development of competence, must, if we accept the arguments mentioned earlier, at least be modular in one sense. The linguistic subsystems that, by hypothesis, obtain for one language must surely obtain for the other language as well. It seems hardly likely that a second language system that is mentally represented in a quite different way should exist alongside, or be integrated into a first language system, that is, in someone who has always been bilingual. Whether second languages learned later have quite a different structure and developmental history is a matter of debate in current second-language research. However, whatever the way in which different languages are represented in the bilingual mind, evidence from crosslinguistic influence in language loss and language acquisition (see Dechert & Raupach, 1989; Gass & Selinker, 1983; Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986; Obler & Hyltenstam, 1989; Seliger & Vago, in press; Weinreich, 1953) would suggest that LI and L2 knowl16
Language modules and bilingual processing edge is not rigidly separated and that knowledge in one system can indeed affect the shape of knowledge in the other. What this precisely means with respect to the idea of autonomy or encapsulation is, of course, theory-dependent. Since knowledge is only "visible" in performance, any crosslinguistic influence between LI and L2 could still be the on-line accessing of what are still separate systems, as in codeswitching. In other words, crosslinguistic influence could be a purely realtime control phenomenon. For example, sequential bilinguals, just like simultaneous bilinguals, producing utterances that exploit their knowledge of more than one language may simply be doing this for reasons of expediency. At the same time, they may be perfectly aware of what aspects of their utterance belong to which language. The systems remain separate but their output can be combined during performance (Meisel, 1989; Sharwood Smith, 1986). If crosslinguistic influence really does take place at the knowledge level and if L2 knowledge is influenced by the structure of resident LI knowledge, then explanations about where and when crosslinguistic influence can and cannot take place should make reference to modular theories of language. It becomes vital in that case to ask how each language is represented and used. If the second language in a non-native user is encyclopedic in nature, then one would expect crosslinguistic influence to operate only between modules that shared the same general cognitive structure, for example, pragmatic knowledge. To take the way anaphoric reference works, for example, one would not expect, under this scenario, the way the firstlanguage grammar required anaphors and antecedents to be bound to be transferred to the second-language system. Since the first-language binding system is, by hypothesis, one of the autonomous processors characteristic of syntactic but not encyclopedic knowledge, one would not expect its properties to be copied on to a second-language system that was of a totally different kind. However, if the second language has the same cognitive make-up as the first language, if it is modular and non-encyclopedic in the same ways, then, in principle, crosslinguistic influence might be expected to occur at all levels (see discussion in Perecman, 1989). Control implications As far as processing control is concerned, rapid code-switching behavior in bilinguals makes it clear that different linguistic systems are often activated concurrently in production. If we consider receptive processing, and specifically how bilinguals process the speech stream, the old question arises of whether or not this is done by a bilingual system requiring a pre-setting of the language system (LI or L2) or at least a very early identification with regard to which language system was to be accessed (see Albert & 17
Michael Sharwood Smith Obler, 1978; Macnamara, 1971). It will be assumed that the clear majority view is the right one, namely that there is no neat division in bilinguals such that for each language, a totally separate, autonomous and encapsulated system is available in reception. Rather, the incoming speech is initially processed by rapid and mandatory mechanisms that make no distinction regarding what language system is expected, that is there is no preattentive language switch. This means that at the outset, at the very least, both/all language systems in the bilingual are activated. In a listening/ speaking situation, this means speech-processing and lexical access. However, it is clearly the case that different rules or routines have to be activated to continue processing efficiently once this initial stage is passed. This stage would seem to come when the phonological analysis triggers a search in the lexicon prior to the parallel, modular syntactic processing that Frazier talks about. Lexical representations in bilinguals are presumably tagged for which language system they belong to (whether or not there is any cross referencing with equivalents in the other language system) so that a search can be carried out efficiently. Lexical representations will thus contain information that triggers access to the L2 syntactic processor. It is clear that in a sequential L2 context, problems encountered at an early stage in processing the speech stream may have serious implications for later stages. Even if initial analysis of the speech stream results in the activation of a particular language-specific set of processors, those phonological processors need to be developed enough to cope with the task. If not, the processing program simply crashes - the learner registers a failure to process the utterances and perhaps attempts to guess from the context using real world knowledge. Another possibility is that the learner automatically co-opts fully developed phonological processors that are not actually appropriate, that is, "belong" to another language system. Sajavaara (1986) suggests that Finns processing English will have serious problems segmenting the speech stream if they deploy Finnish processing mechanisms that assume no consonant clusters in syllable-initial position. If segmentation runs into problems due to Finnish interference, then everything else that follows suffers. Following Frazier, this means that the learner's lexicon cannot be accessed efficiently and that subsequent stages of processing will suffer. The input will be difficult or impossible to handle. This means that Finnish learners of English will have to become aware of the syllable structure of English and, following this development in their knowledge of Finnish, devise appropriate ways of implementing this knowledge in processing incoming utterances. It also means that Finns will be considerably more successful processing graphological information where word boundaries are marked by easily perceptible spaces in the visual field. A somewhat similar illustration, this time with respect to simultaneous French-English bilinguals, was provided recently by Cutler et al, (1989). 18
Language modules and bilingual processing French, being a syllable-timed language, has clear syllable boundaries which enable French native speakers to segment the speech stream accordingly. English is stress-timed. The syllable boundaries are unclear and attempting to segment the speech stream using syllable boundaries is problematic. Cutler and her colleagues provide evidence that adult bilinguals, classifying themselves as French-dominant (albeit generally recognized by others as being native in both languages) have no problem under experimental conditions segmenting in either language. English-dominant bilinguals, on the other hand, apparently do not process the French speech stream like natives under these conditions. Cutler etal. make the intriguing point that perhaps syllable-timing is the marked option in languages in general. That is, the French-dominant learners learnt an exceptional method of segmentation and had no difficulty also segmenting via the default means when necessary (in this case with English). The English-dominant speakers had begun with the unmarked, default option and then found it difficult to switch to the exceptional, marked technique when coping with French. Cutler et al. (1989) therefore suggest that perfect bilingualism may well be a myth. In this specific example, bilinguals simply learn one method of segmenting speech and stick with it. Marked options include unmarked option, but not vice versa. While it is difficult to assess the validity of this claim without further investigation, it does at least provide a useful example of how, even at the control level, no general qualification such as "is accepted as a native" can be taken as interesting until, in modular style, a careful examination of all the various subsystems is conducted. It also shows that even in simultaneous bilinguals, who are apparently fully native in both languages, there seems to be a non-trivial degree of crosslinguistic influence. If preliminary analysis of the speech stream by bilinguals runs into problems, as in the Finnish and French examples above, we may assume that the phonological processor(s) (or presumably the graphological processors in the case of reading) represent the stage at which the system decides whether to engage one set of syntactic processors or another. A clear example would be bilinguals who have knowledge of, respectively, a configurational and non-configurational language, in other words, a language with a syntax based crucially on word order (like English) versus one which is not (like Russian, Japanese, Chinese). If processing the signal at the phonological/graphological stage results in the identification of English, then the syntactic processors to be engaged obviously have to follow configurational principles and take word order not only as stylistic but as relevant to the identification of object noun phrases and so on, that is the assignment of phrase structure. At a simple non-technical level, one could say the more fixed word-order languages require immediate attention to the order of identifiable items in a string whereas a freer-order language with a rich morphology would require that attention should be initially 19
Michael Sharwood Smith directed towards, say, inflections. If attention, for one reason or another, is misdirected, then the subsequent assignment of higher status to inflections in a fixed word-order language (probably poor in inflectional morphology anyway) would exhaust processing capacity better directed elsewhere. The result should then be an empirically observable delay in processing. Clearly, a well-defined theory of processing can be of great benefit in contributing to problems of a specifically bilingual nature.
M eta mode
So far, little has been said about the metalinguistic dimensions of knowledge and control amongst bilinguals. Children, be they bilingual or monolingual, develop language sensitivity at an early age, allowing them to appreciate and make observations and jokes about the words and structures of the language(s) they possess. This manner of thinking about language may be called operating in the meta mode. It would seem, then, that bilingual children just as monolingual children (and perhaps more so: Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins, 1976) operate in the meta mode from an early age although the nature of this operation differs from that of more mature learners by virtue of their cognitive immaturity. Older and more mature learners can make use of the more elaborate (encyclopedic) knowledge about the formal properties of language gained during formal education. For this reason it may not be helpful to distinguish metalinguistic awareness as one end of a scale which ranges from sporadic insights into aspects of language up to the highly formalized understanding of language entertained by academic linguists, that is, metalinguistic knowledge. If the modularity hypothesis as sketched above holds, then the development of metalinguistic ability from the early years onwards must be seen as separate from, and parasitic upon, the growth of intuitive linguistic ability. The child becomes able to reflect on linguistic properties only when these properties have been acquired. Both kinds of ability may be seen in terms of mental representation versus the real-time mechanisms for acting on those representations (see Bialystok, this volume). The separate nature of metalinguistic awareness is a view held by Karmiloff-Smith (1986), who sees it as an optional final stage in LI development. The idea that metalinguistic knowledge is part of what Fodor very generally calls the central processor helps us to see metalinguistic awareness/knowledge as allowing the language user to consciously reflect on and analyze language in the same way that a game of tennis or the act of riding a bicycle can be analyzed without any necessary connection between the degree of explicit knowledge of the person doing the analyzing and the actual degree of skill he or she has in the activity being analyzed. As has 20
Language modules and bilingual processing been indicated above, pragmatic knowledge, the interface between realworld, encyclopedic knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, linguistic competence, would have the same kind of open architecture as a metalinguistic knowledge. The functional aspects of these two kinds of knowledge will of course be difficult since, in order to function efficiently as a language user in given situations, it is vital to know the pragmatics of a language. Being in possession of metalinguistic knowledge, however, is not likely to play the same crucial role in one's day-to-day activities. Notice, however, that a degree of metalinguistic awareness may be important for successful social functioning: to understand the full significance of a speech or a television commercial or indeed jokes based on word-play will be a distinct advantage in dealing with fellow members of a given speech community. In any case, the development of pragmatic and metalinguistic knowledge will, by hypothesis, follow the course characteristic of encyclopedic learning, with the appropriate development of control itself typified by a slow and laborious first stage then later, smooth and automatic provided there has been enough practice, and, crucially, corrective feedback. To the extent that sequential L2 acquisition does not proceed as does first language acquisition, we also expect this pattern to emerge in other areas of the language. The metalinguistic abilities of bilin^uals may well be, as some have suggested (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins, 1976; Kessler & Quinn, 1982; Leopold, 1939-1949) superior to that of monolinguals. In the process of acquiring and using different languages, they may have much more occasion to reflect consciously upon the ways languages differ in all kinds of ways. Looking upon this from a modular point of view, metalinguistically superior language users will not necessarily be superior in their command of other levels of language: the English-dominant French speakers were still not able to segment syllabically as monolinguals do. There is good reason to suppose that the benefits will, again as some have suggested, be in terms of general cognitive development, since in both cases the relevant cognitive domain is not the language-specific module but the central processor (see Diaz & Klingler, this volume; Johnson, this volume). By the same token, metalinguistically superior people, in being more sensitive to all aspects of language that fall outside the language-specific module(s), will, ceterisparibus, be more likely to show a flexible and creative use of language in areas accessible to conscious manipulation. This throws some interesting light on the traditional insistence that learning classical languages, a metalinguistic activity par excellence, is good for mental development. Presumably, it also facilitates relevant aspects of foreign-language learning (within the domain of deliberate manipulation). From a real-time processing point of view, in that metalinguistic processing will by definition be linear and, for the average language user at least, relatively slow and 21
Michael Sharwood Smith laborious, going into the meta mode will disrupt fluent performance and, to the extent that bilingual speakers may have a more enhanced metalinguistic ability, they will have more problems with fluency where they are unable to switch the meta mode off. High-speed metalinguistic processing may be achieved, but this will only arise amongst individuals who have had a great deal of practice, and, where sophisticated structures are concerned, only occur amongst the more creative members of a speech community.
Conclusion
As the above discussion has hopefully made clear, much is to be gained from explicitly adopting some version of modularity theory in investigating psychological aspects of bilingualism. The fact that research so far has already indicated differential effects in code-switching and mixing with regard to different levels of language (Perecman, 1989) suggests an implicit modularity in some approaches anyway. Work done more directly within the domain of generative grammar, where the notion of modularity gains greater precision, turns out to be extremely relevant for understanding the bilingual mind, how bilingual knowledge is represented and how it is used. This, on reflection, is hardly surprising, since Chomskyan metatheory is essentially an attempt at illuminating problems of language acquisition. The usefulness of making a distinction between knowledge and real-time processing should be fairly clear. However, it has simply not been obvious how abstractions such as binding theory, theta theory, and case theory, for example, bear on real-time use of language. One important example here is Frazier's work, which makes it clear that the grammatical subsystems used to explicate linguistic universals may also be implicated in what has here been called knowledge processing, and, by extension, bilingual knowledge processing as well. Modularity, in combination with the knowledge/control distinction, should help us to formulate questions about all areas of bilingual ability more precisely. Depending on the kind of knowledge or processing-control mechanisms we are looking at, we can make reference to particular welldeveloped theories in sister disciplines. We are also protected against rejecting some potentially useful theory of development or processing prematurely on the grounds that it did not work for, say, the development of one particular, such as the lexicon. In addition to this, as the syllabletiming segmentation example suggested, findings in bilingual research may have interesting repercussions for the ways theoretical linguists view relationships between language types and the implications this variation has for learnability. 22
Language modules and bilingual processing References Albert, M. & L. Obler 1978. The bilingual brain. New York: Academic Press. Ben-Zeev, S. 1977. Mechanisms by which childhood bilingualism affects understanding of language and cognitive structures. In P. A. Hornby (ed.), Bilingualism: psychological, social and educational implications. New York: Academic Press. Bialystok, E. & M. Sharwood-Smith 1985. Interlanguage is not a state of mind: an evaluation of the construct for second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 6,101-107. Chomsky, N. 1980. Rules and representations. Oxford: Blackwell. Cummins, J. 1976. The influence of bilingualism on cognitive growth: a synthesis of researchfindingsand explanatory hypotheses. Working Papers on Bilingualism^, 1-43. Cutler, A., J. Mehler, D. Norris, & J. Segul 1989. Limits on bilingualism. Nature, 340,229-230. Dechert, H. & W. Raupach, 1989. Transfer in production. Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex. Ferreira, F. & C. Clifton, 1986. The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348-368. Fodor, J. 1983. Modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Foster, K. 1979. Levels of processing and the structure of the language processor. In W. E. Cooper & E. C. T. Walker (eds.), Sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Foster, S. 1985. Taking a modular approach to universals of language acquisition. Paper presented at SLRF, Los Angeles. Frazier, L. 1988. Grammar and language processing. In F. J. Newmeyer (ed.). Linguistic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gass, S. & L. Selinker 1983. Language transfer in language learning. Ann Arbor, MI: Newbury House. Jackendoff, R. 1987. Consciousness and the computational mind. New York: Academic Press. Karmiloff-Smith, A. 1986. Stage/structure versus phase/process in modelling linguistic and cognitive development. In I. Levin (ed.), Stage and structure: reopening the debate. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Kellerman, E. & M. Sharwood Smith 1986. Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kessler, C. & E. Quinn 1982. Cognitive development in bilingual environments. In B. Hartford, A. Valdman, & R. Foster (eds.). Issues in international bilingual education: the role of the vernacular. New York: Plenum Press. Lasnik, H. 1982. On certain substitutes for negative data. Paper presented at the Workshop on Learnability and Linguistic Theory, May 1982. University of Western Ontario. Leopold, W. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's child (4 vols.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Macnamara, J. 1971. The linguistic independence of bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Behaviour, 10, 480-487. Meisel, J. 1989. Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In L. Obler 23
Michael Sharwood Smith & K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Obler, L. & K. Hyltenstam (eds.), 1989. Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perecman, E. 1989. Language processing in the bilingual: evidence from language mixing. In L. Obler & K. Hyltenstam, (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sajavaara, K. 1986. Transfer and second language speech. In E. Kellerman & M. Sharwood Smith (eds.), Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition (pp. 66-79). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Seliger, H. & R. Vago, in press. Language attrition: structural and theoretical perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharwood Smith, M. 1986. The competence-control model, crosslinguistic influence and the creation of new grammars. In E. Kellerman & M. Sharwood Smith (eds.), Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. White, L. 1987. Against comprehensible input: the input hypothesis and the development of second language competence. Applied Linguistics, #, 95-110.
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2
Phonological processing in two languages IAN WATSON
Phonology is to a large extent the Cinderella of bilingual studies. The most immediately obvious aspect of speech is ironically that which has been least intensively researched with respect to bilingual speech behavior in general, and bilingual acquisition in particular. One reason for this may be its very peripherality in language processing. For the non-specialist, phonology is so predominantly concerned with the mechanics of language realization, so far removed from the broader psychological issues of cognitive development and processing, that it fails to grab the attention (even of the linguist who is a non-phonologist) in the same way as matters semantic, pragmatic, or even syntactic. These others may appeal as worthy of study not only in their own right, but also for their links with non-linguistic cognitive phenomena. The subject of phonology is in itself so complex and ridden with controversy that it is difficult to know where to start to find a conceptual framework which will permit bilingual acquisition to be investigated. Even the analysis of the adult sound system of a single language involves a plethora of theoretical choices. Is the aim a taxonomic phonemic account, and if so how does one deal with any instances of neutralization or overlapping? Should one seek underlying forms, and, if so, how abstract should they be? What about suprasegmental phenomena - will one try to give a metrical account of rhythm, what about tones/intonation, how do these interact with segments? Are there segments? How many dimensions are there? What to do about feature geometry, etc? Each of these choices will fundamentally affect one's view of how phonology works, and therefore how it can be acquired. Worse still, any one of the former may leave open a number of possible views of the latter, a point returned to below. It is thus unsurprising that, even with respect to the acquisition of phonology for monolingual children, the number of studies is very restricted, especially compared to the massive theoretical literature; there are far fewer studies on bilinguals. One of the major problems in acquisition studies lies in drawing the line between phonological and phonetic processing abilities. In a general sense, the term phonology is, of course, often used to refer to all the 25
Ian Watson sound-related aspects of language knowledge and behavior. For the generativists (e.g. Chomsky & Halle, 1968), especially, the phonological component of a grammar is that module which converts a string of lexical/ grammatical items, duly arranged into an acceptable surface structure, into what a speaker actually says. It further, by some ill-explained process, allows the hearer to decode the utterance back into a string of linguistic units. Close attention to the processes of real speech behavior, however, requires recourse to the traditional, but problematic, distinction between the underlying phonological aspects of linguistic expression and the phonetic aspects of how phonological units are realized in perception and production. In this schema, what remains under the heading true phonology is concerned with the structural use of sounds to build linguistic units. Here, one would expect, minimally, (i) information about the number of different contrasts between sounds a particular language makes use of in its lexicon; (ii) enough information about the physical identity of the sounds themselves to allow them to be kept distinct at various levels of processing; (iii) (depending on theoretical orientation) how the structures of different forms of the same lexical item vary. A child's acquisition of phonology, in this sense, is the acquisition of knowledge about the patterning of sounds in his or her native language. Phonetics, in contrast, is concerned with the processes by which a linguistic, phonological representation is turned into an acoustic signal by means of physical gestures, and with how this acoustic signal is reconverted to a linguistic representation by the perceptual system. Clearly, it is closely linked to phonology as the linguistic representation is expressed in phonological units, in phonemes or allophones. But the fact of knowing what the phonemes of a language are is no guarantee of phonetic proficiency in that language; each language has specific and different phonetic ways of realizing its phonemes in different contexts (Nolan, 1989). Thus both German and English have systems which contrast the phonemes /p/ and /b/; these contrast in word-initial position primarily because the former is aspirated and the latter is not. However, aspiration is typically longer in German than in English (Kohler, 1977). In French a similar contrast is normally realized by the presence of closure voicing in /b/, and its absence in /p/ (see, e.g., Simon & Fourcin, 1978). Furthermore, in each language, the same phonemes may be realized and distinguished by different means in positions other than word-initial. A traditional way to express this has been to associate each phoneme in a language with a set of allophones which realize it in different circumstances, but even this approach fails to yield a presentation which captures every single articulatory or acoustic parameter used by the native speaker in continuous speech, with its range of coarticulatory and stylistic variation (see, e.g., Nolan, 1982). Nor can 26
Phonological processing in two languages this range be adequately represented using the feature notations used in the different branches of generative phonology. A more useful conceptualization is one in which a phonological representation in terms of phonemes, possibly with some (largely extrinsic) allophonic variation dealt with by phonological rules, is realized by an array of routines which each native speaker has developed to translate the phonological units into an acoustic signal (via articulatory gestures) in speech production, and to translate acoustic patterns into phonological units when perceiving it. The learning of speech production and perception thus involves not only learning the phonological system, but also the identification of acoustic patterns with elements of that system and the successful imitation of those patterns. The notion that it is quite possible to achieve one of these elements without mastering the others is crucial to understanding the phonological development of children, and especially bilingual children. A further problem arises with the description of both phonological and phonetic phenomena; they are highly variable. Across different accents, identical lexical items may have different phonemic composition, either because the phonemic systems of those accents are different (compare Brittany French, which contrasts /a/ and /a/, to the modern Parisian accent, which does not), or simply because the phonemes are differently lexically distributed (Southern British English and the Midlands variety have identical monophthongal vowel systems, but in the lexical item one, the former has /A/, the latter /o/). A single phonemic unit may also have different phonetic realizations; for example, the French /p/ phoneme is normally realized without aspiration over most of France, but in some areas of the north and in Belgium is frequently aspirated (Goudailler, 1981). On a more detailed level still, even sounds which are phonetically identical will correspond to different acoustic signals when spoken by different people, or even the same people on different occasions. The task facing any child learning the phonology and phonetics of a single language is therefore highly complex. From an ever varying mass of acoustic input, he or she has to: 1. learn to recognize distinct, but non-invariant acoustic patterns; 2. deduce the set of oppositions which constitute the phonological structure of the language; 3. associate the acoustic patterns with the phonological system, despite the non-invariance of the former; 4. master the correct articulatory routines to produce acoustic patterns which satisfy other native speakers as being adequate realizations of different phonemes. Since native speakers of many, possibly all, languages have at least receptive abilities for a wide range of accents, the child will have to learn to 27
Ian Watson perform step 3, above, in a way allowing many-to-many relationships between acoustic signal and phonological unit; and since we all use different accents in different situations, he or she will have to learn different articulatory routines for various phonemes in step 4. None of the four stages outlined above is remotely well understood; indeed they represent only one of many different interpretations of how phonological competence is acquired (see Best, 1985, for a quite different view; Watson, 1985 for objections to it). It is therefore hardly surprising that modelers of bilingual language processing have tended to avoid this area. For approaching the bilingual acquisition of phonology does not merely add to the problems faced, it multiplies them. At each stage of the acquisition process, the child is faced with many more different signals, but without automatically knowing which language they belong to, while younger children cannot initially even know that they represent two different languages. After differentiation between the languages, both the differences and the similarities between the two systems may lead to interference which hampers the acquisition process. That cross-linguistic differences should cause interference is obvious: the child can easily fail to realize that a feature of one language is not shared by another. Crosslinguistic similarities are problematic when phenomena in the two languages are seductively alike, without being identical. Nevertheless, any problems caused by similarities or differences may not be serious. Provided the child's speech behavior is sufficiently close to that of other speakers of each language to allow lexical distinctions to be maintained and communication to be effected, slight infelicities in pronunciation (by monolingual standards) may not be seen as insignificant. There are certainly some bilinguals who seem to achieve monolingual-like pronunciation in both of their languages, at least as far as a phonetically trained listener can judge. Whether this is true of a small or large percentage is an empirical question, but in any case we should like to know if this group is different from those who do not achieve such a balanced performance. However, a further problem lies in deciding what the standard should be by which a balanced performance is judged. Impressionistic judgments must be supplemented by instrumental measurements, and experimental phonetics allows minute differences in individual pronunciation and perception processes to be measured, at a level of detail which is too fine to be perceptible to the best-trained ears. If there is any way in which bilinguals deviate from monolingual norms, we are in a position to know, and if this is the case, it will give us evidence that the two groups may use alternative processing strategies. Of course, monolingual norms are themselves constructs; they conceal such enormous variation that it is very difficult to be sure that a bilingual 28
Phonological processing in two languages is doing something that a monolingual would never do. We must be aware that we can, at best, note tendencies, rather than make absolute statements. To this end, in this chapter the main findings in the literature will be reviewed, not only those pertaining directly to bilinguals, but also, where relevant, those based on monolingual studies. Some new data will also be presented, from an ongoing study of phonological acquisition by FrenchEnglish bilinguals. Three main questions will be addressed in what follows. First, to what extent do bilinguals actually keep the phonological systems of their two languages separate, rather than using a partially merged system? Second, what is the relationship between production and perception? Third, how similar are the stages by which bilinguals acquire phonology to those followed by monolinguals? A hypothesis will be developed that, at least at some stages of acquisition, bilinguals do, in fact, take advantage of the variability which each speech community will accept, in order to achieve the twin aims of reducing the amount of different processing required while avoiding the pitfalls of sounding unlike most native speakers of the language.
Phonological acquisition
Two apparently contradictory claims have been made about the early stages of phonological acquisition. On the one hand there is experimental evidence that infants' early production and perceptual abilities show signs of moving towards the phonological systems of their target language. On the other, it has often been suggested that when speech begins, phonology is hardly acquired at all; Ferguson and Farwell (1975) suggest that in the beginning words and their meanings are learned whole, with no analysis into smaller phonetic units, and consequently no awareness of individual oppositions. The contradiction is resolved by detailed examination of the experimental evidence, discussed below, which suggests that any tendencies in prelinguistic infants reflect either inherent psychoacoustic limitations or phonetic, rather than phonological development. Several papers show infants either producing particular sounds or performing perceptual tasks which seem to be related to the phonological structure of the sounds around them. With respect to the first of these, although children's early vocalizations include all the sounds in the human phonetic repertoire, Locke (1986) shows an increasing tendency in the babbling stage (ages between six and nine months to eighteen months) to produce the sounds which are found in the target language. While this 29
Ian Watson is undoubtedly strong evidence that children's babbling is partly conditioned by the sounds around them, there is no need to believe that this is anything other than a phonetic phenomenon. As a preliminary to true phonological acquisition, the child directs its articulatory activity towards practicing the sounds it hears regularly; there is, however, nothing linguistic about this activity at this stage. A similar argument obtains with respect to the perceptual data. Results from tests concerned with infants' responses to synthetic voice onset time (V.O.T.) continua have suggested that the use of this measure to make categorical discriminations between phonemes differing in voicing quality is both present at a very early stage, and language-dependent. In a study of six to eight month-old infants from English and Spanish speaking environments, Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson (1979) used a head-turning procedure to identify discrimination ability. As noted above, languages differ in the way they realize voicing contrasts, a major distinction being between those like French and Spanish, which contrast initial prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, with a V.O.T. category boundary in the region of 0-15ms., and those like English and German, which contrast voiceless unaspirated (short-lag) and aspirated (long-lag; category boundary around 25 ms.). The English-environment children showed reliable discrimination only between short- and long-lag stops, in line with the English sound system. The Spanish infants were able to discriminate all three different groups: that is, they were sensitive to the contrasts used in both languages. One interpretation of this apparent imbalance in abilities has been prompted by psychoacoustic studies which show that the English contrast corresponds to a discrimination facility inherent in the mammalian auditory system (Kuhl & Miller, 1987). Non-human animals can be trained to discriminate V.O.T. continua categorically, with a category boundary in the 25ms. region. The possibility thus arises that human infants have an inbuilt predisposition to use such a boundary, which has to be changed by experience if they are exposed to a language which functions differently. Englishenvironment children would never have to make such a change, whereas those exposed to Spanish might do so, initially, by a process of suppletion rather than replacement. Even in the first few months of life, the child can thus be seen as establishing the bases of a future phonological system. However, three types of evidence argue against this interpretation. One is that much older children are far less certain in discrimination tasks, irrespective of their language, than would be expected if their very early linguistic exposure had established the phonological categories used by their language. Simon and Fourcin (1978) showed English speakers unable to label continua categorically until the age of five years, and French speakers not attaining sharp categorical labeling until the age of eight. Clearly, whatever the explanation of young infants' laboratory per30
Phonological processing in two languages formance, it does not translate directly into practically useful phonological knowledge. Besides, evidence from other perceptual tests suggests that the ability to discriminate between all three voicing categories may be less language-specific than Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson's results imply. Streeter (1976) showed that two-month-old Kikuyu infants were sensitive to both contrasts, yet, at the relevant (bilabial) place of articulation, Kikuyu use neither! Furthermore, Eilers, Wilson, and Moore (1979) showed that, although six out of eight six-month-old English-environment infants did not show any sensitivity to the prevoiced/voiceless distinction, two did, and a group of English adults reliably discriminated both. Interpretation of such conflicting evidence is difficult, but Burnham (1986) suggests that the general pattern is an initial ability to distinguish among all three categories, followed by the waning or disappearance of any discrimination skills which are not reinforced by environmental stimuli. Thus, English infants show less consistent ability to make the prevoiced/ voiceless distinction because they are not exposed to these two categories of sound in the way that Spanish children are. Nevertheless, the initial discrimination abilities may not be completely lost, because prevoiced stops do exist phonetically in English, as an allophonic variant of the unaspirated set. Similarly, Kikuyu does have a contrast between prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated stops in some places of articulation. Thus whether or not sounds of a particular phonetic type function phonemically in a language, infants may be exposed to some of them. Even the infants who seemed, according to the Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson (1979) and Eilers, Wilson, and Moore (1979) tests, not to be sensitive to this distinction may actually have been so, albeit at too low a level for their head-turning technique to show. In any case, it is implausible to attribute the discriminatory abilities of these infants to developing phonological skills. By definition, a phonological unit forms part of a linguistic system, and children of the relevant ages show no evidence of any ability to produce or understand sounds as tokens of linguistic items. Indeed, infants at this stage may well simply be cognitively incapable of distinguishing phonological classes (MacKain, 1982). The phenomena in question are rather examples of psychoacoustic or phonetic processing abilities (or possibly the development of the latter from the former; see Best, 1985; Watson 1985) at a stage when phonetic processing has not yet begun to serve linguistic needs. Unfortunately, experimental studies of bilingual-environment children in the prelinguistic stage are lacking. Longitudinal comparison between the development patterns of monolinguals and those exposed to two contrastive phonetic inputs at this prelinguistic stage might be very informative, although the apparent need for children in their early linguistic years to relearn these skills must leave a question mark over the exact relevance of early discrimination abilities. 31
Ian Watson First words There is no evidence that when the child's first words appear, they are stored, produced, and recognized as anything other than unanalyzed wholes, associated with specific situations (Barton, 1976; Ferguson & Farwell, 1975; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). An experiment by Barton (1976) showed that a number of children aged 20-24 months were unable to distinguish words on the basis of initial voicing differences without a considerable training period, suggesting that this was not a process they habitually used. Yet children are often able to produce words contrasting in this feature at this stage, the implication being that they are doing so without awareness of the phonetic/phonological units of which the words are composed. In producing these first words, they may simply be transferring to a meaningful use articulatory routines practiced during the babbling stage (Locke, 1986). As the child's vocabulary increases, it rapidly becomes uneconomic to store words as wholes. At this point words are analyzed into smaller units, probably first into syllables, then segments (Mann, 1986). However, the ability to produce appropriately sounds which, according to perceptual tests, are not categorized in an adult-like way (or, in the case of bilinguals, a monoiinguaMike way) is one which persists for many years (Carramazza et al., 1973; Simon & Fourcin, 1978). This is a paradoxical finding, both because it is also often the case that children can perceive distinctions they cannot accurately produce (see, e.g., Smith, 1973) and because, in general, children must learn their phonological systems and speech habits to a large extent by means of their perceptions of others' speech (see further discussion below). Although the early stages of phonological development in bilinguals depend on a multiplicity of factors, bilinguals are probably least different from monolinguals early in the one-word-utterance stage. The majority of the world's bilinguals are probably only initially exposed to one language, so that the first words produced will inevitably be in that language. Besides, even true primary bilinguals, that is those who have been exposed to two different languages almost equally since birth and have continued to be so exposed, are normally unconscious of being bilingual at this stage. The notion of different languages only develops around the age of two years. With the onset of true phonological awareness, two distinctions must be drawn. The first is between simultaneous and successive acquisition of the different languages. Although this is not truly a binary distinction - exposure to a second language can begin at any age - there may be significant differences in the strategies used for phonological acquisition by those who develop two systems absolutely simultaneously, and those who have at least part of one phonological system in place before the other is broached. This contrast is discussed below, in the light of what is known about monolingual acquisition at this stage. 32
Phonological processing in two languages The second contrast is that already alluded to, between production and perception. The presence of a particular sound in an appropriate place in a child's utterances is no guarantee that the child is able to discriminate that sound consistently. It may simply be an easy sound to produce, one developed at the babbling stage. Correct productions can occur without correct perception. However, the mastery of a sound system must be based on the child's correct perception of the production of others, and subsequent modification of its articulatory behavior in the light of those perceptions. In this sense, perception must normally precede production in development. There will often be sounds which children categorize correctly perceptually, but cannot produce properly. In judging a child's progress, it will be essential to monitor both aspects of speech behavior separately. It is inappropriate to assume that they are isomorphic. Monolinguals and bilinguals learning phonology Once past the one-word stage, how does phonological acquisition proceed? One view sees the process as largely one of differentiation. The child learns to recognize as separate sounds which had previously been confused. The most comprehensive attempt to explain acquisition in these terms came from Jakobson (1968), who saw the acquisition of phonological contrasts as being governed by the phonological complexity of the phonemes to be acquired, as expressed in his distinctive-feature system. There would thus be a universally applicable sequence of development, and the order in which all the phonemes used in a language are learnt would be totally determinable. A number of writers quote evidence which seems to support this view. Linell (1979) quotes the sudden differentiation of III and /k/ after a period of using only the former, and claims that when awareness of a particular opposition does come, it is applied to all the known words containing it even if these were previously confused with other words because the distinction was not known. Fourcin reports evidence of afixedorder of acquisition, typically followed by children learning English in England, and shows that the salient factor is not the frequency with which phonemes appear in the input to the young child (Fourcin, 1978). Despite this, the Jakobsonian view clearly provides an inadequate conceptual framework for investigating the processes of phonological acquisition (Elliot, 1981; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). Although phonological acquisition may be seen as being attained once the set of a language's oppositions has been mastered, the point has already been made that it is not clear what learning an individual opposition exactly means. During acquisition, perception and production are often not in synchrony, some allophones of a phoneme are learnt before others, and, despite Linell's 33
Ian Watson observation above, children often use the correct sound in one word, while substituting a different sound for it in others, especially at the stage where at least some words are still stored as gestalts (Locke, 1986; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). There is considerable variation in order and speed of acquisition across different children; individual children reach the same goal in a variety of ways. In modeling acquisition, all of these factors must be allowed their place. Most of the evidence concerning the effects of bilingualism between the ages of two and four years comes from case studies, usually based on parents' notes (there is a dearth of scientifically controlled studies of any children in this age group). The children may be divided into two groups; (i) those simultaneously acquiring two languages; (ii) those acquiring one language after another. Simultaneous bilinguals There is agreement in the literature that primary bilinguals can attain the facility to function in two different languages simultaneously, without taking twice as long - or, it seems, any significantly longer time - than a monolingual needs to acquire one. Initially, the main task is that of differentiation; with a plethora of different stimuli around him, the child must recognize first that these represent the combined output of two different linguistic systems, and then identify which elements - and in effect which categorical distinctions - belong to and constitute which system. Most bilingual children seem to be unaware that they are dealing with two different systems until the age of about two, by which time phonological development may be well under way. Leopold (1939-1949) reports that Hildegard treated all her linguistic knowledge in both English and German as forming a single system until shortly before this age. Soon after her second birthday she started to show awareness of the difference, even using the word German without having been taught it, then slowly developing a clear awareness of the two systems. Similarly, Imedadze's child, learning Russian and Georgian, first began to separate the two languages at about twenty months (Imedadze, 1967). Once the discovery is made, differentiation begins, and it immediately becomes very difficult to glean from the case studies what processes are being used. An ordinary monolingual child goes through several stages in which he simplifies the system he is trying to learn. Bilinguals simplify as well, but do so in each language and crosslinguistically. Any attempt to define patterns or rules in what they do is inevitably hampered by the problem of dominance - the condition of the child being more capable in one language than in the other, often due to greater exposure to one - which recurs, though not ostensibly, in many case studies. There is very 34
Phonological processing in two languages little documentation of balanced subjects, and those studies which do exist are uninformative about the area of interest here. Ronjat (1913) is more concerned with discussing the effect on Louie of the one language one person principle; neither Celce-Murcia (1978, an essentially synchronic study) nor Pavlovich (1920), while claiming that their subjects mastered their two systems simultaneously, go into detail. Amazingly, these three are almost alone in describing fairly balanced subjects. Leopold's Hildegard was exposed far more to one language than the other for long periods. Of course, perfectly balanced bilinguals are almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, there may be different processes of differentiation corresponding to greater or lesser degrees of dominance, and the lack of clear information on this in the literature is frustrating. Leopold considered that Hildegard had perfected her English phonology between the ages of three and four, but her German system was not completely native-like until the age of five, when she spent a protracted period in Germany. The problems seem to have been both phonetic and phonological, in that she could neither accurately pronounce nor accurately distinguish the front rounded vowels which are a feature of German, but not of English. On her return from her visit to Germany, Hildegard had become dominant in German, and for a time exemplified the other major problem faced by bilinguals who are dominant in one language; the difficulty of preventing the incursion of one (already formed) language system on the domain of the other - of avoiding interference, as defined by Weinreich (1953). After four weeks in a totally German environment, Hildegard was reported as speaking English with a marked German accent; on her return to the U.S. A. this problem disappeared, and she began to have low-level phonetic problems in pronouncing German. It seems quite possible that Hildegard may have attained differentiation, at least in the latter stages, by a process of superimposing the unknown system on the known, that is, by using the first system as a base, and building onto it additions and alterations. In other words, she might to a large extent be using a procedure known to be used by secondary bilinguals (although this does not totally account for phonological learning in secondary bilinguals; see Anderson, 1981). Of course, balanced primary bilinguals might do the same to a certain degree, especially if their two languages are such that the phonological system of one is much more easily learnt than that of the other; in this case the learning of the former might in fact facilitate that of the latter. But it also seems possible that a more balanced subject might use a different method, starting with an averaged system which has contrastive patterns and perceptual category boundaries intermediate between the two target systems and slowly and more or less simultaneously moving away from this in either direction towards the differential phonologies. In all prob35
Ian Watson ability both balanced and non-balanced children may use both strategies, the only difference being one of emphasis. (Partly) consecutive bilingualism Fantini's Mario underwent a different pattern of exposure to his languages, resulting in a different pattern of phonological acquisition (Fantini, 1985). It is a difficult pattern to characterize. Fantini himself refers to Mario as "one whose mother tongue is Spanish, but whose initial contact with English was only slightly delayed . . . hence a 'simultaneous' bilingual" (Fantini, 1985, p.37), but indicates that at the age of two, when phonological acquisition was well under way, his son was only an incipient bilingual', indeed Mario's first productive use of English postdated that of Spanish by a year. The case serves to illustrate the arbitrariness of such labels, but Mario contrasts with the earlier cases cited in the slightness of his exposure to the second of his languages at this stage, and for our purpose he will be treated as a consecutive bilingual. Fantini's account of Mario's phonological development is based on Jakobsonian principles, although he does also give important details of allophonic variation. Differentiation was a protracted process for the child. His Spanish consonantal system was almost complete at the age of 2 years 6 months, at which stage he used virtually no English sounds other than those which had close equivalents in Spanish. The correct patterns for English began to appear only after the near-completion of the Spanish, in a quick burst from 2 years 6 months to three years - though aspiration of unvoiced consonants did not appear till three years and two months. Even then, the two systems were not properly differentiated in production; the /th/ and /dh/ sounds were not mastered until the age of six, and numerous Spanishinfluenced pronunciations (/x/ for /h/) remained until this stage. Nevertheless, by the age of five, a phoneme-perception test demonstrated that Mario was clearly able to distinguish correctly all the English phonemes. Mario also showed some signs of interference from English in his Spanish pronunciation. Once he had mastered the English aspirated consonants, he began inappropriately to aspirate certain Spanish consonants. Possibly the imperfect separation of his two sound systems facilitated this interference. It is far clearer in this case than in Hildegard's that one phonological system was developed by building out from the other. This is not to say that all of Mario's English system was developed in this way; there may also have been some independent developments. The /th/ phoneme may be one example of this. Its late development is, as Fantini points out, common among monolinguals. Two conclusions may be drawn from this survey of the development of the phonological system. The first is that the developing bilingual does 36
Phonological processing in two languages have to learn processing skills which are unnecessary for the monolingual. He or she has to recognize that a sound system is entirely arbitrary, in that it is possible to use more than one to communicate. He or she must therefore learn to assign similar physical events to different systems of oppositions according to the linguistic context. This can be done effectively, with certain provisos, noted in the next section. However, each phonological system is not necessarily acquired in a way analogous to monolingual acquisition (though it may be that procedure is possible). Commonly, one system, or at least aspects of it, will dominate the other, so that the child fails to make some oppositions in one language, or at least produces some sounds in a foreign way, due to interference. The second, more negative, conclusion is that remarkably little is known about this essential stage in bilinguals' development. We lack instrumental data, and have almost no data at all on completely balanced primary bilinguals. The absence of experimental data means that we cannot be certain how far claims of monolingual-like abilities in both languages are valid; there are examples from modern phonetic research of distinctions which are consistently made in speech, but which even trained phoneticians cannot detect. Fortunately, there are far more studies of children aged from four upwards; these are discussed in the next section. Older children With a few exceptions, by the age of four or soon afterwards, children have a fully developed phonological system. This means that they are capable of recognizing all the phonemic distinctions in their target language, and also of pronouncing the words of that language in a way judged acceptable by other native speakers. It does not guarantee that all the parameters involved in their speech perception and production correspond to those used by adult speakers. In this section, evidence is reviewed that in both of these areas bilinguals, while apparently highly proficient in both their languages, may actually exhibit different strategies from monolinguals. Some preliminary results from an ongoing project comparing French and English mono- and bilinguals are discussed which suggest that the latter sometimes choose phonetic options which reduce the difficulties created by their need to use two systems, without thereby sounding in any way abnormal in either. A favorite investigation area for child perception in general, and bilinguals in particular, is the voicing distinction between cognate word-initial stop consonants. This is particularly suitable because, although children apparently master the voicing contrast at an early stage, neither their production nor their perception of the various acoustic features associated with it is adult-like for a number of years. Furthermore, as already noted, the realization of this contrast is highly variable cross37
Ian Watson linguistically. Simon and Fourcin (1978) showed that one acoustic feature used distinctively, V.O.T., was not used categorically in perception until the age of four by a group of English-speaking monolinguals, and not until eight or nine by French monolinguals. A second feature, the presence of a voice-excited Fl transition, is only reliably distinctive in English, and was learnt by the English group by the age of eight, and not at all by the French group. It has also repeatedly been shown that children's productions of V.O.T. distinctions only slowly move towards adult norms. Similarly, Ohde (1985), in a production study, showed that variations in fundamental frequency consistently found in adult subjects were not found in six-year-olds. This combination of a protracted learning period and crosslinguistic differences gives an excellent tool for the comparison of monolingual and bilingual phonetic development. Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo (1980) and Konefal and Fokes (1981), both measured V.O.T. in the productions of Spanish-English bilingual children. Bond's subjects were two sisters, aged four and seven, the latter being severely language-disordered. Both were successive bilinguals, and indeed had only been learning English for six months; the older had reached only the two-word utterance stage in English, but the latter was "beginning to speak English in school" presumably with some fluency. Strikingly, the younger child had clearly differentiated V.O.T. patterns for her stops in the two languages, with figures corresponding well to monolingual norms. She prevoiced her voiced Spanish stops, aspirated her voiceless English stops, and produced Spanish voiceless and English voiced tokens in the short-lag region. The older child, in contrast, produced all her Spanish stops in the short-lag region - a pattern typical of younger children. Konefal and Fokes' subjects were three sisters, aged four, seven and ten, who also had Spanish as their mother tongue. The ten-year-old was language-disordered. All three had been exposed to English for three years at the time of the study. Again, the two normal children show clearly differentiated patterns in their two languages. The younger one contrasts with the four-year-old in the earlier study in that her Spanish voiced stops were concentrated in the short-lag region, with the voiceless set spanning the upper part of that region and the long-lag region. The seven-year-old, however, like Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo's four-year-old, consistently prevoiced Spanish /b, d, g/, and had short lags in /p, t, k/. Both children contrasted short- and long-lag stops in English although the younger of them did this less consistently, with a number of longer V.O.T.s in the voiced set. The oldest, disordered child showed considerable overlap between the two categories in both languages. The normal developmental pattern for V.O.T. production is for all stops to be produced in the short-lag range initially, with production extended, as appropriate for the language, to the long-lag or prevoiced ranges (Zlatin 38
Phonological processing in two languages & Koenigsknecht, 1976). For some children this process of extension may not be complete until well after the fourth year. We cannot, therefore, necessarily interpret the lack of prevoicing in Konefol and Fokes' four-yearold as being ascribable to English-Spanish interference. In fact, all of the normal subjects in these two studies seem to offer strong confirmation that, with respect to V.O.T., developing bilinguals can relatively easily produce different patterns in two different languages, even when those patterns are contradictory, in the sense that Spanish voiced stops and English voiceless ones are both in the short-lag region. The mastery of such duality of patterning seems to require very little time; Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo's four-year-old had achieved it in six months, although she had the advantage of coming to her second language at an age when V.O.T. production is rapidly developing in many children - and hence, perhaps, easily modified. But if in the overall pattern of V.O.T. development, bilinguals are similar to monolinguals, there is nonetheless evidence that their realizations of voicing contrasts do have some significant differences. Watson (in press) reports on a study comparing monolingual and bilingual development of a number of acoustic features associated with the voicing contrasts in English and French; two, V.O.T. and Fl onset frequency, will be discussed here. Bilinguals and monolinguals aged six and ten were compared, and there were also adult control groups. One of the striking results was the variability in productions, even by the monolingual adults. In French, phonologically voiced stops were most frequently prevoiced, but there were many instances where they were produced in the short-lag region, or were prevoiced, but with a break in the voicing during or immediately after closure (see Goudailler, 1983). French voiceless stops were sometimes significantly aspirated. Both of these tendencies were more pronounced in the child groups; indeed the monolinguals showed a strong tendency to aspirate velars. This tendency did not diminish between the two age groups. (See table 2.1.) The bilinguals showed a more consistent trend to reduce voice onset times with age, especially for the Frencn voiced tokens. However, they also produced the voiceless series with more aspiration than the monolinguals in both age groups and in both languages. This series thus comes to resemble the English series more than is typical for monolinguals (although their English voiceless stops are even more aspirated). This increase in aspiration results in a second disparity between the bilinguals and the monolinguals. In English there is a consistent, and perceptually salient, difference in the onset frequency of thefirstformant in vowels following voiced and voiceless stops; this follows inevitably from the presence of a period of aspiration in the latter, and its absence in the former. Because French does not systematically use aspiration, this difference is rarely present and has been shown to be perceptually unimportant 39
Ian Watson Table 2.1
Averaged V.O. T. production values
Subject group
Voiced
(a) V.O.T. velar- English (values in ms.) Bilingual 6-year-olds 37.5 Bilingual 10-year-olds 25.5 Monolingual 6-year-olds 30.05 Monolingual 10-year-olds 29.9 Monolingual adults 23.5 (b) V.O.T. velar-French (values in Bilingual 6-year-olds Bilingual 10-year-olds Monolingual 6-year-olds Monolingual 10-year-olds Monolingual adults
ms.) *29.9 *20.0 *33.1 *22.1 *10.5
Voiceless 105.4 103.2 84.1 94.0 62.0 68.7 65.2 58.2 60.9 28.5
Note: * before a figure indicates that the majority of tokens in this category had at least some prevoicing. However, there was also considerable aspiration in some tokens. The figure given here takes no account of prevoicing.
(Simon & Fourcin, 1978). The bilinguals in this study resembled the monolingual English subjects in their English speech, having a clear, statistically significant distinction for this feature. But they also showed such a distinction in their French productions, albeit a smaller one than in English. None of the French monolingual groups had any statistically significant difference in this feature, although there was a slight tendency in the same direction. For both of these parameters, the bilinguals' productions in French are systematically different from those of their monolingual peers, while in English their V.O.T.s are longer for the voiceless series. Nevertheless, given the intermittent tendency of the monolinguals to produce these same features, it is not the case that individual utterances by bilinguals would be distinguishable from monolinguals' utterances. This reflects the impressionistic judgments of both the children's own teachers and native speakers to whom the recordings have been played that there is nothing obvious which distinguishes the bilinguals' speech from that of monolinguals in either language. It is thus possible for bilinguals to use different production routines from monolinguals in their realization of the phonemes of their two languages, without this being perceptible to other native speakers. Just as hearers are not aware that children in both languages habitually produce longer V.O.T.s than adults, the differences between monolinguals and bilinguals go unnoticed. A compromise seems to be reached by the bilingual between the two needs to sound sufficiently like a native speaker to conform to two different language communities and to reduce the pro40
Phonological processing in two languages cessing load of having to master two different phonetic repertoires. Without matching exactly the norms of monolinguals of his or her age group, he or she finds a way of remaining within the limits of acceptability. Perceptual studies In the light of the infant studies, there is a surprising dearth of studies of perception by bilingual children. This may be a disguised blessing, as there is strong evidence that many of the results of perceptual tests carried out on monolinguals and on adults are misleading, because the stimuli used were insufficiently natural to evoke responses typical of normal speech behavior. Investigations of the voicing contrast are prime offenders (Watson, 1983; Williams, 1977). A wide range of acoustic cues can be identified with voicing perception (Lisker, 1978; Watson, 1983) and there is evidence that different languages, and even different subjects, attach different importance to different cues (see, e.g., Bailey, Summerfield, & Dorman, 1977); furthermore, there are interactions between different cues. If a set of test stimuli lack a feature which is highly salient for a particular group or subject, their responses may be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, such tests are potentially valuable as a source of knowledge about differences in monolingual and bilingual perceptual processing. Those studies which have been carried out indicate that there are more substantial differences in this aspect of speech behavior than in production. They also, therefore, point to considerable asymmetry in bilinguals' perceptual and production routines. As part of an ongoing study by the author, an experiment was carried out whose object was to compare the perceptual development with respect to English of a group of English-French bilinguals to that of the monolingual group tested by Simon and Fourcin (1978). The stimuli were identical to those used by Simon and Fourcin. Subjects were groups of primary balanced bilinguals who were living in England, but being educated in French, and those also experienced some French at home. There were four age groups; five, six, eight, and ten years. Simon and Fourcin's results had shown that by the age of five, English monolinguals already showed sharply categorical labeling of the V.O.T. continuum. The five-year-old bilinguals, however, showed quasi-random labeling, with a tendency to judge as voiced stimuli with very long V.O.T.s. By the age of six, they had almost caught up with the monolinguals, although their labeling was not quite as categorical as the latter group's. There was no disparity by the age of eight. A second aspect of the test compared sensitivity to a second acoustic feature, the Fl transition discussed above. The results for the five-year-olds were again chaotic, but the six-year-olds were clearly sensitive to the presence or absence of the cue. In its absence, the category boundary 41
Ian Watson
V.O.T.(ms.) Figure 2.1 English six-year-olds' percentage /g/ responses. The percentage of /g/ responses obtained from stimuli with (natural) and without (flat) a rising transition following the release burst
is lowered from about 26ms. to 20ms. (figure 2.1), a disparity which increases in the eight- and ten-year-old groups to 26ms. vs. 15 ms. There is thus a relative delay in the attainment of a stage of perceptual development by the bilinguals, but not one which has long-lasting consequences. There is no evidence that their perceptual processing strategies are any different from those of monolinguals. Obviously, an investigation of their perception in French, which is under way, may further elucidate this result. This finding runs counter to those of two studies of adult bilingual perception, which, however, pertain to bilinguals in quite different social situations. Carramazza et al. (1973) compared Canadian French-English bilingual to monolingual speakers of both languages. The bilinguals were all native speakers of French, but had learnt English from, at the latest, their seventh birthdays. The responses of the two monolingual groups showed the classic pattern found in such tests: quite distinct crossover points from voiced to voiceless categorization (figure 2.2), although the monolingual French group showed a less sharp crossover than the English. The bilinguals, however, showed virtually no cross-language differentiation in their response patterns. They were more categorical in their responses than the French monolinguals, but less than the English, and the point on the V.O.T. continuum where they crossed from predominantly voiced to voiceless judgments was intermediate between those shown by the two mono42
Phonological processing in two languages 120 100
c S
X X X X X X
H—h
Voiced
80H
Voiceless
60-
Discrimination
40Discrimination/ identification overlap
200
1 ) 1 ) 1
X K K
-20 0
20
40
60
80
V.O.T.(ms.)
Figure 2.2 Classic discrimination/identification function. The classic pattern of matched identification and discrimination typically found in V.O.T. categorization tests. The change from voiced judgments (line marked with vertical dashes) to voiceless (line marked with crosses) is very sharp and rapid, and corresponds to a peak in the discriminability of tokens which are adjacent on the continuum (unmarked line)
lingual groups. This in no way reflected their productions in either language, which corresponded closely to the monolingual norms. Similarly, Williams (1977) found that a group of eight Spanish-English secondary bilinguals, screened to be well balanced, kept their two languages quite distinct in producing voicing contrasts, but responded to a V.O.T. categorization (perception) task similarly in both language conditions. There was considerable intersubject variation in where the boundary was situated, with five subjects placing nearer the typical English boundary, and three near the Spanish boundary. Williams attributes these results to three phenomena. One is the composition of his stimuli, which included perceptually salient cues other than V.O.T. for English, but not for Spanish. The second is the hypothesis that the bilingual may make more use of these other cues than the monolingual, exposure to two different systems focusing attention on those features which are most distinctive in each language. Obviously, a failure to categorize a V.O.T. continuum differently in different conditions in the laboratory does not equate with a perceptual deficit in a real language situation. Finally, he indicated that there may genuinely be more variability in the perceptual use of acoustic cues by bilinguals. There is, then, ample evidence that in perception, the experience of 43
Ian Watson a bilingual upbringing can lead to the use of rather different strategies from those used by monolinguals, although the similarity in acquisition pattern between bilingual children and monolinguals in English demonstrates that this is not necessarily so. The disparity may be due to a difference in processing patterns between those who are already bilingual at the time of their first phonological development, and those who are consecutive bilinguals. However, far more detailed study of the responses of different types of bilinguals to different acoustic cues is needed before clear conclusions can be drawn. Considerable attention should obviously also be paid to individuals' results, in the light of Williams' identification of considerable variability in responses. In both production and perception, therefore, studies of older children (and adults) suggest that bilinguals behave in ways which are at once distinct from monolinguals and very similar to them. Bilinguals modify the same variables in the production of both their languages as monolinguals, within approximately the same limits, but within these limits the details of their use of these variables may differ. Their perceptual use of acoustic cues to phonemic identity may differ, although it may be less that they use different cues, than that they attribute different weightings to them. There does seem to be a disparity between the production and perception habits of bilinguals which is not found in monolinguals; this is an area where further research is urgently needed. Conclusions
Differentiation, avoidance of interference, learning to categorize acoustic input in two contrasting ways are all tasks which must be carried out by the bilingual and which the monolingual escapes. Obviously, all of these assume a degree of mental processing, involving strategies which will remain undeveloped in those exposed to only one language. The nature of these strategies may vary from individual to individual, and according to the type of bilingualism. However, having to adopt different strategies during phonological development does not necessarily entail the use of different processes once this development is complete. It would be quite possible, despite differences in the acquisition process, for a perfectly balanced bilingual to have two completely independent phonological and phonetic systems, each identical in all ways to those of monolinguals. On the other hand, there could be a degree of integration between the two systems. Or, as a third possibility, the bilingual may have two systems, but which differ in some way from those of monolinguals. The studies reviewed and described here support this third possibility, at least with respect to production. There is undoubtedly an early stage 44
Phonological processing in two languages when the two systems are mixed, but this is due to the undifferentiated state of the two languages as a whole. After differentiation, the children described in the literature clearly develop two sound systems, but there is variation in the correspondence of these systems to those of monolinguals, especially in their phonetic detail. At the phonemic level, even children who are dominant in one language seem to achieve a near-perfect match with monolinguals in both languages. In their productions they may, however, retain noticeable traces of interference in the realizations of particular phonemes, that is at the phonetic level. Such interference is not universal. All of the perceptual studies reported above had subjects who in their productions were, at least for the variables tested, impressionistically indistinguishable from monolinguals. Their productions were not, however, identical when measured instrumentally. In the case of the English-French subjects tested by Watson (in press) there was a tendency to produce voiceless stops in a similar way across the two languages. This might be indicative of an economy in the use of phonetic, articulatory routines, in a case where such an economy does not threaten either the satisfactory realization of the two different systems or the identification of the bilingual with either of the language communities. More widespread differences were found in perceptual processing. One (unlikely) interpretation of these would be that even subjects whose systems are separated with respect to production have a common system for perception. Such a situation would be likely to prejudice overt language behavior. It is more likely that these subjects do have two different sets of perceptual routines, but that these were not revealed in the experiments. Because the tests carried out have taken as their starting point features known to be salient for monolinguals, they have revealed when bilinguals do not use such features. They have, inevitably, been less effective at revealing what other features, less salient for monolinguals, they use instead. It is also possible that if more widespread experiments are performed, a greater degree of variation will be found in the perceptual processing of monolinguals than is currently recognized. As with production, we may find that bilinguals rarely use strategies monolinguals never use, but they do use them with different frequencies. The number of unanswered questions in the area of bilingual phonology is still enormously high. With the massive increase in bilingual studies over recent years, and the increasing availability of phonetic instrumentation, there is no excuse for these questions not to be tackled, especially at a time when interest in speech processing but almost exclusively monolingual speech processing - has never been higher. It is high time to invite Cinderella to the ball. 45
Ian Watson References Anderson, J. 1981. Considerations on phonological assessment. In J. G. Erickson & D. R. Omark (eds.), Communicative assessment of the bilingual bicultural child. Baltimore: University Park Press. Bailey, P. J., Q. Summerfield, & M. Dorman 1977. On the identification of sinewave analogues of certain speech sounds. Has kins Laboratory Status Report, 51152, 1-25.
Barton, D. P. 1976. The role of perception in the acquisition of speech. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. Best, C. T. 1985. Discovering messages in the medium: speech perception and the prelinguistic infant. Haskins Laboratory Status Report, 81, 139-180. Bond, Z. S., J. E. Eddey, & J. J. Bermejo 1980. VOT del Espanol to English: comparison of a language-disordered and normal child. Journal of Phonetics, 8,287-291. Burnham, D. K. 1986. Developmental loss of speech perception: exposure to and experience with afirstlanguage. Applied Psycholinguistics, 7, 207-240. Carramazza, A., G. H. Yeni-Komshian, E. G. Zurif, & E. Carbone 1973. The acquisition of a new phonological contrast: the case of stop consonants in French-English bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 54, 421-428. Celce-Murcia, M. 1978. The simultaneous acquisition of English and French in a two-year old child. In E. Hatch (ed.), Second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Chomsky, N. & M. Halle 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row. Eilers, R. E., W. Gavin, & W. R. Wilson 1979. Linguistic experience and phonemic perception in infancy: a cross linguistic study. Child Development, 50, 14-18. Eilers, R. E., W. R. Wilson, & J. M. Moore 1979. Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time. Journal of Child Language, 6, 1-18. Elliot, A. J. 1981. Child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fantini, A. E. 1985. Language acquisition of a bilingual child: a sociolinguistic perspective (to age ten). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ferguson, C. & C. B. Farwell 1975. Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language, 57, 419-439. Fourcin, A. J. 1978. Acoustic patterns and speech acquisition. In N. Waterson & P. Snow (eds.), The development of communication. London: Wiley. Goudailler, J.-P. 1981. Exemple de traitement de Topposition de "sonorite" par les enfants du cours preparatoire - utilisation de la methode electroglottographique. Montreal: 12emes Journees d'Etudes sur la Parole. 1983. Diverses possibilites de materialisation du trait de voisement: etude electroglottographique des occlusives d'enfants ages de 7-8 ans d'un Cours Elementaire. lleme I.C.A., Paris, 267-270. Imedadze, N. V. 1967. On the psychological nature of child speech formation under conditions of exposure to two languages. International Journal of Psychology, 2, 129-132. 46
Phonological processing in two languages Jakobson, R. 1977. Child language: aphasia and phonological universals. The Hague: Mouton. Kohler, K. 1977. Einfuhrung in der Phonetik des Deutschen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Konefal, J. A. & J. Fokes 1981. Voice onset time: The development of Spanish/ English distinction in normal and language disordered children. Journal of Phonetics, 9, 443-444. Kuhl, P. K. & J. Miller, 1978. Speech perception by the chinchilla: identification functions for synthetic VOT stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 63, 905-917. Leopold, W. P. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's child (4 vols.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Linell, P. 1979. Psychological reality in phonology: a theoretical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lisker, L. 1978. Rabid vs. rapid: a catalogue of acoustic features that may cue the distinction. Haskins Laboratory Status Report, 54, 127-132. Locke, J. 1986. Speech perception and the emergent lexicon: an ethological approach. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.), Language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, MacKain, K. S. 1982. Assessing the role of experience on infants' speech discrimination. Journal of Child Language, 7, 527-542. Mann, V. A. 1985. Phonological awareness: nature and nurture both contribute. Annual Bulletin, Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 19, 95-110. Menyuk, P. & L. Menn 1979. Early strategies for the perception and production of words and sounds. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (ed.), Language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolan, F. J. 1982. The nature of phonetic representations. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 1. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. 1989. The descriptive role of segments: evidence from assimilation. Paper presented at the second conference on laboratory phonology, Edinburgh. Ohde, R. N. 1985. Fundamental frequency correlates of stop consonant voicing and vowel quality in the speech of preadolescent children. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 78, 1554-1561. Pavlovich, M. 1920. Le langage enfantin: acquisition du serbe et du frangais par un enfant serbe. Paris: Champion. Ronjat, J. 1913. Le developpement du langage observe chez un enfant bilingue. Paris: Champion. Simon, C. & A. J. Fourcin 1978. Cross-language study of speech pattern learning. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 63, 925-935. Smith, N. V. 1973. The acquisition of phonology: a case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Streeter, L. A. 1976. Language perception of 2 month old infants shows effects of both innate mechanisms and experience. Nature, 259, 39-41. Watson, I. M. C. 1983. Cues to the voicing contrast: a survey. Cambridge Papers 47
Ian Watson in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 2. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. 1985. Direct perception of speech. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 4. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. In press. Acquiring the voicing contrast in French. A comparative study of monolingual and bilingual children. In W. Ayres-Bennett, W. Green, & J. N. Green (eds.), Variation and change in French. London: Routledge. Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. Williams, L. 1977. The perception of stop-consonant voicing by Spanish-English bilinguals. Perception and Psychophysics, 21, 287-297. Zlatin, M. & R. Koenigsknecht 1976. Development of the voicing contrast. A comparison of voice onset time values in stop perception and production. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research ,19, 92-111.
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3
Second-language learning in children: a model of language learning in social context LILY WONG FILLMORE
In this chapter I discuss a view of language learning that has evolved from a decade and a half long period of research on the learning of English by young children for whom English is a second language. My goals in a series of longitudinal studies have been to understand the nature of the process, and to discover what causes the variation that exist among learners in respect to the ease with which they learn the new language. I have been particularly interested in the interplay of cognitive and social factors in the learners, with situational and linguistic factors in the settings in which learning takes place. In all, I have studied the development of English in well over 200 five- to eleven-year-old children, some of them for as long as three years. In this chapter, I discuss the model of language learning that emerged from that decade and a half long program of research. The word 'emerge' is used advisedly. The model was not an a priori view of language learning that led to the sequence of studies mentioned above: it evolved post hoc as I attempted to reconcile the sometimes contradictory findings from the investigations of individual factors in language learning. The first set of such factors examined were learner characteristics that earlier research (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Schumann, 1978; Swain & Burnaby, 1976; Wong Fillmore, 1976, 1979) suggested were key contributors to variation in second-language learning. Among them were those aspects of personality and social style that can affect the learner's ability and inclination to interact with people who speak the target language and who can help with its learning: for example, sociability, communicative need, risk taking, and selfconfidence. Other learner characteristics examined were ones that were likely to affect the cognitive aspects of language learning: inductive reasoning, verbal memory, and pattern recognition - aspects of cognitive functioning that could affect the ease with which learners recalled and made sense of the language they heard people using, and detected the regularities that existed within such samples of speech. The main hypotheses tested in that research were that each of such social and cognitive characteristics contributed to 49
Lily Wong Fillmore variation in language learning, and that collectively they were predictive of speed and accuracy in language learning. The results from this line of research have been mixed, as they have been for other researchers (Beebe, 1983; Bialystok & Frohlich, 1977; Naiman et al., 1978; Rossier, 1976; Strong, 1982). The characteristics that are supposed to facilitate language learning have been found to be positively associated with rapid second-language development in some situations, but not in others (Wong Fillmore, 1983, 1989a). For example, children who score high in measures of sociability and communicative need are generally good learners, but only in social settings where they are outnumbered by speakers of the target language, and where speakers and learners can interact freely with one another. In such settings, the extent to which children interact with one another depends on two factors. The first - the learner's social style and communicative needs - affects the learner's ability to establish and maintain contact with speakers of the target language. The second relates to the availability of speakers of the target language, and their willingness and ability to interact with the learner in ways that promote language development. In such situations, then, the learner's social skills and styles proved to be important variables. Social characteristics such as sociability and communicative needs are far less useful as predictors of language-learning outcome in settings where there are many more learners than there are speakers of the target language, or where there is little freedom for the two groups to interact. In fact, it appears that if either condition obtains, social characteristics are not particularly useful as predictors. In one of the classrooms we studied, 40 per cent of the children who entered school at the beginning of the year had learned no English by the end of it (Wong Fillmore, 1982). Some of the children who did not learn English that year were ones we predicted would have difficulty. They were shy, reclusive, laconic, or socially inept. The others were quite the opposite. They were among the most socially skilled, outgoing and verbal children in the class. The children were free to interact with classmates, but because most of the children in the class were non-English speakers, they spent their time interacting with one another in their native languages or in learner varieties of English. The more sociable the child the greater the time spent interacting with peers, it appeared. The teacher and her assistant spoke English exclusively and the children might have learned English from them, but they did not because of the way the teachers structured their class. The class was one in which most of the instruction activities were "child-selected" and directed. The teacher and her assistant created a rich environment where there were many activities to select from, and freedom for the children to interact with one another while they worked. There were few instances of teacher-directed instructional activities, or 50
Second-language learning in children formal instruction over the course of the year. The teachers monitored the children's activities closely, and they discussed their work with them and instructed them largely on an individual basis. These interactions provided the children opportunities to hear and learn English, but they were not frequent enough for most of the learners to sustain their languagelearning efforts. In another classroom we studied, one that was structured quite differently but with essentially the same student composition, sociability and communicative need were less predictive of language-learning outcomes than were characteristics such as verbal memory and pattern recognition. This class was tightly structured by the teachers. Virtually every activity was teacher directed and controlled. The children had few opportunities to interact with one another in instructed activities, so their social inclinations and skills played relatively little part in getting access to speakers of English. They heard and practiced English during formal instructional activities, where learner characteristics such as attentiveness, verbal memory, and pattern recognition were more important than the social ones being discussed. Thus, it would appear that if learner characteristics are predictive of variation in second-language learning, they are not predictive in any simple or straightforward manner. This line of investigation did, however, reveal additional sources of variation to be examined, and ways to explain why the findings on learner variables have been as mixed as they are. The variation we find across learners in acquiring second languages simply cannot be accounted for by differences in learners alone. Other sources of variation can be found in the settings in which languages are learned as well as in the speakers who are providing access to the target language and assistance in learning it. Since then, I have investigated the extent to which variation in language learning stems from differences in target-language speakers and in the settings which bring learners and speakers together (Wong Fillmore et ai, 1985). The findings of these investigations dovetail nicely with studies that other second-language researchers have conducted in Canada and elsewhere (especially Cummins & Swain, 1986; Ellis, 1984; Harley etal., 1987; Lightbown, 1983; van Lier, 1988), and from this collective work, the following model of second-language learning has emerged. A model of language learning in social context The model is a complex social one, and is difficult to talk about in purely abstract terms. It is easier to show how its components fit together when they are discussed in relation to situations that are familiar to all of us. Typically, second-language learners in societies like the United States or Canada are members of immigrant families. The family speaks a language 51
Lily Wong Fillmore other than English, and continues to use it in the home and in the immigrant community. At the same time, however, the members of the family know they will have to learn English in order to get along in their adopted society. English is the key to getting acquainted with the people who live there, to getting an education, and most importantly, to getting jobs. They have a genuine need to learn the language, and are motivated to do so because it offers them access to the social and economic life of the community they are joining. Nonetheless, learning this new language is an enormously complex task. Each individual in the family will have to discover what the speakers of the target language know that allows them to speak and use it for social and communicative purposes. The language learner's task consists of figuring out and learning the full system of linguistic, social, and pragmatic rules that govern the language behavior of the speech community. Despite the complexity of the task most individuals can handle it. People, irrespective of background, do not come to the language learning task empty handed: in their efforts to figure out how the new language is used by its speakers, they are guided by prior social, linguistic, and general world knowledge. As members of one language community, they know what sorts of things people talk about, and they know in general what kinds of verbal behaviors are appropriate for a variety of social situations and settings. They have some understanding of what they will have to learn to say in English. In learning the new language, they will be looking for ways to express the thoughts and sentiments they need to express, and to achieve the communicative goals they customarily accomplish in their primary speech community. The immigrant family is in an ideal situation for language learning since it resides in a setting that provides generous exposure to the language in use. The members of the family can hear and learn the language in the workplace, classroom, neighborhood, and playground - wherever they come into contact with people who speak the target language well enough to help them learn it. Language learning requires the help and involvement of people who already speak it: their speech behavior allows the learners to figure out how the language works, provided they are mindful and considerate of the learners' linguistic limitations. The model's components The language-learning situation I have outlined contains the necessary ingredients for second-language learning. There are three major components: (1) learners who realize that they need to learn the target language (TL) and are motivated to do so; (2) speakers of the target language who know it well enough to provide the learners with access to the language and the help they need for learning it; and (3) a social setting which brings 52
Second-language learning in children learners and TL speakers into frequent enough contact to make language learning possible. All three components are necessary. If any of them is dysfunctional, language learning will be difficult, or even impossible. When all three are ideal, language learning is assured. Each of them can vary in a great many ways, however, and some of this variation can critically affect the processes by which language is learned. These are the three essential components of the model. Three types of processes come into play in language learning, each of them intricately connected with the others. These can be described as (1) social, (2) linguistic, and (3) cognitive. I will discuss each in turn. Social processes. By social processes, I refer to the steps taken by learners and TL speakers to create a social setting in which communication by means of the target language is possible and desired. Social processes figure in language learning in the following way. Learners ordinarily require social contact with people who speak the TL to learn their language. These contacts give the learners both the incentive and the opportunity to learn the new language. They allow the learners to observe the language as it is used by TL speakers in natural communication, such observations providing the learners with the linguistic and social data that eventually allow them to figure out how the language is structured and used. In the course of these contacts, learners have to make the speakers aware of their special linguistic needs, and get them to make whatever accommodations and adjustments are necessary for successful communication - a difficult task. Communication with learners is never easy because it takes special thought and effort to make oneself understood, and to figure out what the learner is trying to say. Many people find the effort unrewarding, and try to avoid such contacts. If the TL speakers happen to know the learners' LI (first language), they may find it easier to communicate by means of the shared language. When that happens, the contacts between learners and TL speakers obviously do not provide any exposure to the new language. In interactions in which the TL is used, the learners have to participate at some level, since the quality of their participation plays a crucial role in getting speakers to use the language in the special ways that make the speech samples from these contacts usable as language-learning data. When TL speakers and learners interact, both sides have to co-operate in order for communication to take place. The learners make use of their social knowledge to figure out what people might be saying, given the social situation. The learners assume that the speech used by the speakers is relevant to the immediate situation; if the TL speakers are being cooperative, this will indeed be true. This is possible when the social settings in which learning takes place provide meaningful contacts between learners 53
Lily Wong Fillmore and speakers of the language. Those situations that promote frequent contacts are the best, especially if the contacts last long enough to give learners ample opportunity to observe people using the language for a variety of communicative purposes. Those which also permit learners to engage in the frequent use of the language with speakers are even better. Linguistic processes. By linguistic processes I refer to the ways in which assumptions held by the speakers of the target language cause them to speak as they do in talking to learners - in other words, to select, modify, and support the linguistic data they produce for the sake of the learner. On the learners' side there are assumptions about the way language works that cause them to interpret the linguistic data they have available to them. Linguistic processes figure in language acquisition in several crucial ways. The first intersects with the social processes described above, and in a sense, involves linguistic processes principally from the perspective of the speakers of the target language as they interact with learners. In essence, what learners have to get out of these contacts is enough linguistic evidence to allow them to discover how the language works and how people use it. The end product of the acquisition process is linguistic knowledge the phonological, lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic knowledge that eventually allows learners to speak and comprehend the new language in a full range of social and communicative situations. What it takes to acquire this kind of knowledge is exposure to linguistic data in the form of situationally anchored speech produced by speakers of the language in the context of social interaction that involves the learner in one way or another. These linguistic data, together with the supporting social context in which the data are anchored, constitute what researchers studying first- and second-language acquisition refer to as "input" - the materials on which learners can base their acquisition of the language. Language produced by speakers in social contacts with learners can serve as input when it has been produced with the learners' special needs in mind. It is not ordinary language, but language which has been selected for content, and modified in form and presentation. It tends to be structurally simpler, more redundant and repetitive, and is characterized by greater structural regularity than is found in ordinary usage (Gaies, 1979; Hatch, 1983; Long, 1981, 1983). Krashen (1982) has argued that for language to serve as input, it must be "comprehensible" to the learner - well enough anchored situationally for its meaning to be completely recoverable from the context of use. Others who have examined the nature of the language used in native-non-native speaker discourse have argued that what is even more important is that modifications occur as learners negotiate with TL speakers on the meaning of the discourse that takes place between them (Gass & Varonis, 1985; Pica & Doughty, 1985; Tarone, 1981). 54
Second-language learning in children Linguistic processes figure in the making of these adjustments in that people generally operate with some sort of theory of what their language is like, and they have beliefs about the kind of adjustments they ought to make when talking to anyone who is not fully proficient in their language - as when talking to babies, or to foreigners. The modifications that speakers make in talking to language learners are based partly on notions they have about what people who do not know the language well would find difficult to understand, and what they would find easy. Studies of the phenomenon of "foreigner-talk" (Clyne, 1968,1982; Ferguson, 1977) suggest that modifications made by speakers on the basis of a priori beliefs about the relative difficulty of linguistic forms are not always helpful to learners, and can, in fact, mislead them as to what the target forms are like. More useful accommodations are based on actual feedback provided by the learners as to whether or not they understand what is being said to them. When learners appear to understand, speakers can assume that the adjustments they are making are appropriate or even unnecessary. When they appear not to understand or to be having difficulty following what is said, then the speakers make adjustments in the form of what they are saying, or they do something else, verbally or otherwise, to allow the learners to figure out what is being communicated. In an important sense, then, it can be seen that learners and speakers collaborate in producing the adjustments which benefit the learners. This leads to the second way in which linguistic processes appear to figure in language acquisition, a way that intersects with cognitive processes. Looked at from the learners' perspective, the initial problem in language learning is to make sense of what people are saying in the new language. In part, this is achieved by paying close attention to what is happening while people are talking, and by assuming a relationship between speech and the events in which it occurs. The learner must guess what people might be saying given the social situation at hand. This might seem like an impossible task, but second-language learners have special resources to help them in this effort. They have a prior language and thereby the means to make educated guesses about what people are likely to talk about or say in a variety of situations. Because they already have a language, they know about linguistic categories such as lexical item, clause, and phrase. This awareness of grammatical form and structure will predispose them to look for equivalent properties in the new language data they have available to them. Similarly, through the experiences they have had in their first language, learners are generally knowledgeable about the speech acts and functions that can be performed linguistically. They know about the uses of declarative and interrogative structures, about affirmation and negation, about expressions of certainty and uncertainty in speech, and the like. They have used and are therefore familiar with such 55
Lily Wong Fillmore forms for making requests, promises, denials, declarations, and questions. They know that one can ask questions, and that questions ordinarily require answers. They know that questions can serve as requests for information, as indirect requests for action, as greetings, and for a host of other communicative functions. This kind of prior linguistic knowledge and experience will lead secondlanguage learners to seek and to discover the means for accomplishing the same functions in the new language. In other words, they are guided in their language-learning efforts by what they know to be possible and useful from their knowledge of the first language. Thus, second-language learners start out with a fairly good idea of what to look for in the new language. The assumption that forms will be found in the L2 which are functionally equivalent to LI forms can lead learners to acquire them more efficiently than they might otherwise. At the same time, however, it can also interfere with learning, since this assumption sometimes leads learners to draw largely unwarranted conclusions that L2 forms are functionally and structurally identical to LI forms and usages. When that happens, wefindfirst-languageinterference or transfer. Overall, however, the result of this process is positive. By applying the knowledge they have of what people are likely to say in various social situations to what they know are possible forms, patterns, and functions in language, learners are more or less able to give meaningful interpretations to the language they hear, and thus, to discover eventually the principles that govern the structure and use of the language itself. Cognitive processes. The third type of process in language learning is that which can be described as cognitive. In a sense the cognitive processes in acquisition are the central ones since they involve the analytical procedures and operations that take place in the heads of learners and ultimately result in the acquisition of the language. Let us consider what the cognitive task involves. The primary linguistic data which learners have available to them as input for their analyses consist of speech samples produced by speakers of the target language during social contacts in which the learners are themselves participants, as I have argued. Hence what the learners have to work with are observations of the social situations in which the language was produced, and streams of vocal sounds produced by speakers according to complex and abstract systems of grammatical and social rules that systematically and symbolically link up sounds, meaning representations, and communicative intentions. What they must do with these data is discover the system of rules the speakers of the language are following, synthesize this knowledge into a grammar, and then make it their own by internalizing it. That in capsule form is what the cognitive task is for any language learner. 56
Second-language learning in children Figuring out how the speakers of the target language are using the noises they produce to represent meaning is the first step (Peters, 1983, 1985). This involves discovering the principles by which segments of the speech produced by TL speakers relate to events, ideas, experiences, objects, and the other things that people are known to talk about. Discovering how the speech serving as input segments, that is, figuring out where one thing ends and another begins, is critical to the procedure. Once the learners know what the units are, they can figure out how they are used to represent meanings. They eventually discover how such units can be assembled structurally to communicate more complex ideas and thoughts in the target language. Finally, the cognitive task involves figuring out the principles by which the speakers of the language use it to achieve their communicative goals and intentions: what do the speakers of the language talk about, and what can they do with the language they speak? Learners apply a host of cognitive strategies and skills to deal with the task at hand: they have to make use of associative skills, memory, social knowledge, and inferential skills in trying to figure out what people are talking about. They use whatever analytical skills they have to figure out relationships between forms, functions, and meanings. They have to make use of memory, pattern recognition, induction, categorization, generalization, inference, and the like to figure out the structural principles by which the forms of the language can be combined, and meanings modified by changes and deletions. Such cognitive tools can be described as general cognitive mechanisms. Some language-learning theorists would object to this claim. According to the prevailing linguistic theory, a special cognitive mechanism is involved in language acquisition (Chomsky, 1965, 1975). This mechanism, which is referred to as the "language-acquisition device," or L.A.D., is said to operate in a quite different way from ordinary cognitive processes. Its workings cannot be observed; they can only be inferred from the fact that all ordinary children learn a first language, and that they appear to do it in ways that cannot be explained by ordinary cognitive processes. One of the major arguments for the cognitive processes involved in acquisition being special ones is that many of the features of the grammar that learners eventually acquire cannot simply be induced from the linguistic data that are available to them. In fact, the argument goes, it would be impossible to explain how children can arrive at structure as complex and subtle as found in a competence grammar, based on the relatively meager structural evidence they are able to extract from the language spoken around them, unless we assume that a certain amount of that structure is already available to the child's innate language-learning mechanism. By this view of acquisition, the processes that have been described here as social and linguistic are regarded as incidental or peripheral phenomena. If they figure at all, 57
Lily Wong Fillmore they play only trivial roles; everything that is really important in language learning has to do with the working of L.A.D. Adherents to the L.A.D. proposal have argued that no matter what other kinds of information or help are available to learners, the primary data they have to work with are samples of speech consisting of phonological signals which are not cognitively penetrable - they are not tractable to ordinary cognitive manipulations or analytical procedures that are available to children. The only explanation to people who hold this view is that such rules are already 'known' to the acquisition device in some abstract sense, requiring only exposure to data in which such rules figure, to trigger their discovery. That may be the case in first-language learning. Nearly everyone does in fact end up learning a first language, despite considerable differences in general intellectual endowment and early language experiences, and no matter how difficult or complex the target language. It does not seem to be true in the case of languages after the first, where great differences can be found in language-learning ability across individuals. What I believe to be the case is this: language learning involves two kinds of cognitive processes, both those which are specialized for language learning (i.e., of the L.A.D. type), and those which are involved in more general intellectual functioning. In first-language learning, mechanisms of the first type figure more heavily than do the second. In fact, the cognitive skills of the second type are just developing while children are acquiring their first languages. By the time individuals are likely to find themselves learning a second language, however, such general cognitive skills are well developed. They figure in whatever cognitive tasks the individuals encounter, including the ones involved in learning a new language. The L.A.D.-type mechanisms that are said to figure so heavily in first-language learning may also figure in second-language learning. In fact, I would argue that both types of cognitive mechanisms are involved in language learning, whether the learner is dealing with a first or a second language. The degree of involvement of these two types of mechanisms is reversed, however, for second-language learning. While specialized language-learning mechanisms figure in an important way too, general cognitive mechanisms are more heavily involved. This, in fact, may be a crucial difference between first- and secondlanguage learning. There are two kinds of evidence for believing that general cognitive abilities and strategies figure more heavily in the acquisition of second languages than specialized abilities do. The first consists of observations of strategies that learners appear to follow when they tackle a second language (Bialystok, 1983,1984; Faerch & Kasper, 1980,1983; Klein, 1986; Klein & Dittmar, 1979; Meisel, 1983; Selinker, 1972; Wong Fillmore, 1976). The second relates to observations of individual variation in the learning 58
Second-language learning in children of second languages (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Naiman etal., 1978; Wong Fillmore, 1979, 1983). The kind of cognitive strategies and skills that I have described in this chapter - namely, the ones we find learners applying in getting access to the language, in breaking it down into units, in figuring out its structural properties, and in extracting its principles of usage - make use of general cognitive mechanisms rather than specialized ones. The cognitive work learners engage in results in them figuring out and acquiring a lot of rules, principles, and patterns, etc. But such materials do not necessarily add up to a grammar. At some point, the knowledge which has been gained through the workings of general cognitive mechanisms must be consolidated and assembled, in a manner of speaking, into a competence grammar. This, I would argue, is where the language-specific cognitive mechanisms come into play; through these processes, what the learner has sorted out gets synthesized into a competence grammar, and perhaps a lot of the details of the grammar get refined here as well; that is the work of the L.A.D. or whatever one wishes to call the innate language-learning mechanism people seem to have. This last part, I admit, is speculative: there is no way of proving or disproving it. Variation in components These, then, are the processes that figure in language learning. We can now consider how they work, or do not work, in relation to variation in the components that have been identified: learners, speakers of the target language, and the social setting. Let us return to the example of the typical language learners in this society. The adults in the family typically come into contact with TL speakers in the workplace, in bureaucratic and service encounters, in informal social settings or in adult-education classrooms. Adult language classes are seldom ideal settings for language learning, however, since there is in most cases just one TL speaker (the teacher) to support the efforts of many language learners (the students). How well they work for language learning depends on the adequacy of the teacher's methods and materials, and the receptiveness of the students to formal language instruction. The kind of language the learners hear and practice in such settings can vary considerably in its richness and usefulness. Bureaucratic and service encounters can generally be dismissed as major opportunities for language learning. The interactions they invite between learners and TL speakers seldom last long enough, are repeated frequently enough, or provide enough incentive for the TL speakers to assist the learners to support language learning. Such encounters may motivate the learner to learn the language (in order to participate more successfully at future such 59
Lily Wong Fillmore encounters), but they do not offer the learner much support for learning the language. Far better for language learning are informal social encounters with TL speakers, and encounters with them in the workplace. In most cases, however, the language limitations of the immigrant adult preclude jobs or friendships that require much TL communication. In the United States, the jobs that adult newcomers are likely to get are ones where most of their co-workers are also non-English speakers, or ones in which they do not need to interact much with English speakers. Thus, a non-English speaker seeking a job in a restaurant is more likely to get a job as a dishwasher or busboy than as a waiter or bartender. Such jobs work against language learning in two ways: they neither require the adult to use much English, nor do they offer much support for learning the language. From the language learner's perspective, the best jobs are ones that put the learner in close proximity to TL-speaking co-workers, and which require co-operation between workers to do what has to be done. The TL speakers are then motivated to communicate with the learners and help them learn the language, and the learners are motivated to do their part as well. None of the settings that the adult members of the immigrant family find themselves in, and few of the TL speakers they encounter can provide or match the support that is available to the children, however. The children of immigrant families are in the best position to learn a new language. They come into contact with speakers of the TL in school which, in many respects, is the ideal social setting for language learning (Ellis, 1984; van Lier, 1988). It was noted that language learning is possible when learners are in frequent contact with speakers of the target language, and the two groups are motivated and able to interact with each other in some fashion. Typically, immigrant children find themselves in classrooms surrounded by English speakers. In such a setting the social conditions for language learning outlined earlier are easily enough met. The learners are in constant social contact with speakers of the target language. The speakers (the teachers especially, but classmates as well) have ample reason to interact with the learners in this setting, and they are generally aware of the learners' limitations in the language. In their efforts to communicate with learners, they tend not to depend on speech alone but to accompany their speech with actions, or to give access to meaning in other ways. What the learners must do is observe carefully what is happening while others speak, listen to what they are saying, figure out what they are talking about, and how they do it. They apply their prior social and linguistic knowledge in making sense of their observations, and eventually, by exercise of general cognitive strategies they discover what speakers know that allows them to communicate in the target language. This is easier for some learners than for others. Let us consider the question of variation in second-language learning, 60
Second-language learning in children since this is what leads to the argument that general rather than specialized cognitive processes are involved in second-language learning, and that social and linguistic processes play the roles I have described. Variation in learners One of the most striking differences between first- and second-language learning is in the relative amounts of individual variation that can be found among the two types of learners. Clearly, there is variation to be found even among first-language learners (Nelson, 1981; Peters, 1977, 1983). The differences, however, are not regarded as great. While children may vary somewhat in their rate of primary language development, the variation among first-language learners is minor compared to that found even among relatively young second-language learners. Differences of up to five years can be found in the time children take to get a working command of a new language. Learners differ considerably both in how easily and how completely they master the grammatical details and intricacies of a second language. Some are able to learn it as completely and as well as they did their first language; others never completely master the forms or uses of the language. A substantial portion of this variation may be due precisely to the involvement of the kind of cognitive mechanisms that have been identified here as the ones that figure most heavily in second-language learning. Individuals apparently do not vary in having an innate capacity to learn language. If this mechanism were as heavily involved in the learning of second languages as it is said to be in the learning of first languages, we would not expect to find any more variation in second-language learning than in first-language learning. But if, as I have argued, the kind of cognitive processes that are involved in second-language learning are the ones which relate to general cognitive abilities, the variation makes sense. We know that there are considerable differences across individuals in such abilities. The differences in ability that figure in language learning (verbal memory, auditory perception, pattern recognition, and so on) are not ones that figure heavily in general intelligence, although some of them obviously are related (for example, categorization, generalization, and association). The point is that much of the variability found in second-language learning can be traced to differences found among learners in the application of these general mechanisms and abilities that figure in language learning. Learners who have poor auditory memory will have a difficult time remembering the things they hear in a new language. If they cannot remember what they hear, they will not find it easy to figure out what it means or how it is structured. Those who are poor in auditory perception will have difficulty discriminating the sounds of the new language, and hence will have 61
Lily Wong Fillmore difficulty making sense of what they hear and reproducing it. Learners who are poor in pattern recognition will have difficulty finding the patterns they must eventually acquire in the new language. Variation in language learning along the cognitive dimension is not just a matter of differences in learner endowments in cognitive abilities, however. It is also affected by other learner variables. Age is an obvious one. Research has shown that older learners have an advantage over younger learners with certain aspects of second languages (Ervin-Tripp, 1974; Krashen, Long, & Scarcella, 1979; Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978). It has been argued that older learners acquire new structures and forms more rapidly and easily because they have better-developed learning strategies and cognitive abilities. But the cognitive advantages that come with age and experience do not always result in better language learning for older learners. Social and communicative needs, which become increasingly complex with age, can interfere with the process. In learning a new language, it is necessary initially to suppress both social and communicative needs to a degree. Learners must interact with TL speakers in order to get needed exposure to the language and assistance in learning it. They do not share a common language, however, so this kind of interaction is not easy. Learners cannot say all they need or want to say, nor can they establish themselves socially with the TL speakers as they might if they spoke their language. What they need are ways to interact and talk without much actual communication at an informational level. There are many more opportunities for young children to interact in this manner than there are for older ones, and for children in general than for adults. Children can play together without much real talk, but there are few ways for older learners to interact with one another without it. I have observed kindergarten-age language learners working and playing with classmates hour after hour, unhampered by the fact that they do not understand one another. By the third and fourth grade, children at eight or nine years of age not only have fewer opportunities for this kind of interaction, but they are much more hamstrung by the inability to communicate easily with one another. Thus, it appears that one way in which young learners have an advantage over older ones is that their social circumstances make it relatively easier for them to interact with TL speakers in ways that support language learning. Personality is another type of variable that can interact with age differences to affect both the social and cognitive processes involved in language learning. Personal characteristics which may not hinder language learning in young children may become major problems later in life. As individuals mature, there is an increasing investment in their views of self and in the traits they regard as their own. One personality characteristic in particular whose influence increases 62
Second-language learning in children with age is mental rigidity, a trait which varies considerably from person to person. Learning a new language requires an individual to consider multiple possibilities, and to avoid making premature decisions about the meanings and uses of the forms they are learning. Learners who are rigid in their thinking find it difficult to deal with multiple possibilities, or with things they cannot immediately understand. Unfortunately, there is much of that to deal with in the learning of a new language. The unwillingness or inability to accommodate new information or the unknown can make it extremely difficult for learners to handle many of the aspects of the task that I have outlined. Another personality or cognitive-style characteristic that can affect language learning relates to risk taking (Beebe, 1983). Language learning requires learners to apply inferential skills in figuring out what people are saying in the language, and in discovering how the language they hear relates to the social situations in which it is used. Some learners find it hard to take the risks involved in acting upon information gained through guessing, and in fact may be unwilling to risk much guessing at all. They find it hard to try out whatever knowledge they have acquired of the new language by their observations because they are afraid of being wrong, or of appearing foolish. Or they find it difficult to take the next step in language learning, which is to draw generalizations from the relationships they discover, and to test them out. Whatever the problem, the cognitive processes that should be operating do not function as they should for some learners, and as a result, they do not learn as quickly or well as they might. Variation in settings and TL speakers Studies of variation in second-language learning offer evidence of ways in which TL speakers and the social settings affect the social and linguistic processes that figure in acquisition, too. Let us first consider ways in which characteristics of social settings affect the social processes involved in language learning. Social settings vary in the opportunities they offer for learning language; these are partly a function of their composition (that is, the ratio of TL speakers to language learners), and partly a function of their structure and purpose. As noted earlier, social settings work best for language learning when TL speakers outnumber learners, and when they are structured in ways that maximize interaction between the two groups. Some settings provide learners with few opportunities to get close enough to speakers of the language to do them any good, or the kinds of contacts they provide are inadequate for language-learning purposes. The contacts may be too brief, or too infrequent, or too limiting in the kind of exchanges they allow. It was noted that classrooms are perhaps the ideal setting for language 63
Lily Wong Fillmore learning. But even classrooms can differ widely in the quality and quantity of input they provide learners (Allen etaL, in press; Lagaretta, 1979; Wong Fillmore, 1982, 1989b; Wong Fillmore et al., 1985). If learners outnumber TL speakers, the learners may not have enough contact with speakers. If the TL speakers are themselves imperfect speakers of the language, the kind of input they provide for learners may not be an adequate representation of what the learners ought to be aiming at. This has been well documented in the immersion classrooms that have been studied both in Canada and in the United States (Campbell, 1984; Cummins & Swain, 1986; Lambert, 1984; Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Snow, Galvan, & Campbell, 1980; Swain, 1984, 1988; Swain & Lapkin, 1982). Classrooms for language learning can also differ in the extent to which they require the learners themselves to play a role in getting the social contact needed for language learning, and in the role interaction itself plays in the process (Ellis, 1984; van Lier, 1988). It has long been assumed that direct interaction between learners and speakers is necessary in order for language learning to take place. But in our classroom research, we have found that some learners can in fact pick up a language pretty much by observing their teachers and peers, despite having little direct interaction with them (Wong Fillmore, 1983; Wong Fillmore et al., 1985). The ability to do so depends on the structure of the classroom settings, the kind of language used in them, and the characteristics of the individual learners. Children who lack the inclination or skills to interact socially with TL speakers can nevertheless learn the language, provided the setting offers them access to meaningful input, and opportunities to practice the language in the context of structured instructional activities. It appears that what is essential is that learners have access to language that is appropriately modified for them, and is used in ways that allow learners to discover its formal and pragmatic properties. This is a function not only of social settings, but of the TL speakers in them too. There were among the classrooms I have studied ones in which the English used by teachers for group instruction worked so well as input that all of the language learners in the class profited from the experience, irrespective of whether they were inclined to interact with speakers of the target language (Wong Fillmore, 1982). The children who make the best use of such opportunities are ones who score relatively high in the learner characteristics that appear to influence the cognitive processes involved in language, are highly motivated, and attentive enough to learn by observation. When there are regular activities that both invite and support the use of the target language in the context of learning about subject matter that is made relevant and interesting to the children, they learn the language, with or without much additional informal social contact with speakers. But classrooms, as noted earlier, can vary considerably as settings for language learning. Differences in structure and in class composition 64
Second-language learning in children are two important ways in which they can affect language learning. Differences in TL speakers in those classes can as well. TL-speaker variables figure in the process by affecting the quality and quantity of support available to language learners. Individuals who play the role of "TL speaker" have to know the language well enough to provide reliable samples of it for the learners to work on. In classrooms (for example, Canadian and American immersion programs) where nearly everyone is a language learner, the speech the children hear most often is produced by learners like themselves: it represents an interlanguage rather than a mature form of the target language (Selinker, Swain, & Dumas, 1975). Whether or not children in such situations can learn a standard variety of the language depends on their getting enough help from the TL speakers in the setting who do know the language well enough to support their efforts. If their teachers, who presumably are proficient speakers of the TL, provide them with enough opportunities to hear and use the language, and if they provide them with adequate corrective feedback when they use learner forms of the language, they do. But as Swain and her colleagues have found in their studies of language learning in Canadian immersion classrooms, little of the necessary feedback is provided in some cases (Swain, 1988). Attitudes and beliefs held by the TL speakers can affect the role they need to play in language learning. The ones that most critically affect their willingness to interact with the learners and the manner in which they do so are the following: how they feel about interacting with the learners; what they regard as their responsibility to the learners; what they believe about their own ability to communicate with the learners and about the learners' ability to understand and to speak; and what they think would be helpful to the learners. Individuals differ considerably in such matters. TL speakers who believe that their language-learning interlocutors will not comprehend authentic instances of the language may engage in the use of inappropriate adjustments, with the result that the input that is available to the learner is "foreigner talk" (Clyne, 1968, 1982; Ferguson, 1977). Or the speaker may bejieve that adjustments are unnecessary; in which case, the speech they use in interacting with learners may be incomprehensible to the learners. Or, if the TL speaker believes that the learners are not able to understand the language at all, they can abandon efforts to communicate by use of the target language. If they share a common language with the learners, they use it. If they do not, they try to communicate by non-verbal means, or they give up trying. These TL-speaker variables affect communication and learning in all settings - even in classrooms where the TL speaker is the teacher. In classrooms where the language used by the teacher does not work well as input, or in more unstructured situations, as in "open classrooms" or 65
Lily Wong Fillmore on the playground, where students cannot count on getting the free input provided by teachers in instructional activities as described above, the interaction between learners and TL speakers is all-important, and learners play a much greater role in getting the input and support they need for language learning. In such situations, learner variables such as personality and social skills can play a substantial role in language learning. Learners who find it easy or desirable to interact with TL speakers get many more of the social contacts needed for language learning than do learners who are not as interested, or motivated, or who are less able to manage the kind of social contacts needed. Variables such as personality, social style, social competence, motivation, and attitudes in both learners and speakers of the target language can affect language learning, in fact. Conclusion
What I have tried to show in this chapter is how the parts of the model that has been described here figure in the process of language learning, and how variation in the three components can crucially affect the outcome of the process. The attempt to find simple or straightforward explanations both for variation and for language learning has not been particularly fruitful. The processes that figure in language learning can be understood only when all of the components of the model are considered. Similarly, variation in language learning cannot be explained or predicted without a consideration of the complex interaction among the many factors that are involved in language learning. The model that has been discussed here is just a proposal, however. I continue to work on it, and to test it on the language-learning data my colleagues and I have collected over the years.
References Allen, P., M. Swain, B. Harley, & J. Cummins 1990. Aspects of classroom treatment: toward a more comprehensive view of second language education. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain (eds.), The development of second language proficiency. New York: Cambridge University Press. Beebe, L. M. 1983. Risk-taking and the language learner. In H. Seliger & M. Long (eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Bialystok, E. 1983. Some factors in the selection and implementation of communication strategies. In C. Faerch & G. Kasper (eds.), Strategies in interlanguage communication. London: Longman. 1984. Strategies in interlanguage learning and performance. In A. Davies & 66
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C. Criper (eds.), Interlanguage: proceedings of the seminar in honour of Pit Corder. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bialystok, E. & M. Frohlich 1977. Aspects of second language learning in classroom settings. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 13, 2-26. Campbell, R. N. 1984. The immersion approach of foreign language teaching. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books. Clyne, M. 1968. Zum Pidgin-Deutsch der Gastarbeiter. Zeitschrift fur Mundartforschung 35,130-139. (ed.) 1982. Foreigner talk. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 28. Cummins, J. & M. Swain, 1986. Bilingualism and education. Aspects of theory, research and policy. London: Longman. Ellis, R. 1984. Classroom second language development. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Ervin-Tripp, S. 1974. Is second language learning like the first? TESOL Quarterly, 8, 111-127. Faerch, C. & G. Kasper 1980. Processes in foreign language learning and communication. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 5,47-118. 1983. On identifying communication strategies. In C. Faerch & G. Kasper (eds.), Strategies in interlanguage communication. London: Longman. Ferguson, C. A. 1977. Simplified registers, broken language, and Gastarbeiterdeutsch. In C. Molony, H. Zobl, & W. Stolting (eds.), Deutsch im Kontakt mitanderen Sprachen. Kronberg: Scriptor. Gaies, S. 1979. Linguistic input in first and second language learning. In F. Eckman & A. Hastings (eds.), Studies in first and second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gardner, R. C. & W. C. Lambert 1972. Attitudes and motivation in second language learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gass, S. & E. M. Varonis, 1985. Task variation in native/nonnative negotiation of meaning. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Harley, B., P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain 1987. Final report. The development of bilingual proficiency study. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Hatch, E. 1983. Simplified input and second language acquisition. In R. Andersen (ed.), Pidginization and creolization as language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Klein, W. 1986. Second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, W. & N. Dittmar 1979. Developing grammars. Berlin: Springer. Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S., M. Long, & R. Scarcella 1979. Age, rate and eventual attainment in second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 13, 573-582. 67
Lily Wong Fillmore Lagaretta, D. 1979. The effects of program models on language acquisition by Spanish-speaking children. TESOL Quarterly, 13, 521-534. Lambert, W. E. 1984. Overview of issues in immersion education. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. Lambert, W. E. & G. R. Tucker 1972. Bilingual education of children: the St. Lambert experiment. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Lightbown, P. 1983. Exploring relationships between developmental and instructional sequences in L2 acquisition. In H. Seliger & M. Long (eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Long, M. 1981. Input, interaction, and second language acquisition. In H. Winitz (ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 379, 259-278. 1983. Linguistic and conversational adjustments to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5,177-193. Meisel, J. 1983. Strategies of second language acquisition: more than one kind of simplification. In R. Andersen (ed.), Pidginization and creolization as language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. Stern & A. Todesco 1978. The good language learner. Research in Education (no.7). Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Nelson, K. 1981. Individual differences in language development: implications for development and language. Developmental Psychology, 17, 225-287. Peters, A. M. 1977. Language learning strategies: does the whole equal the sum of the parts? Language, 53, 560-573. 1983. The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Language segmentation: operating principles for the perception and analysis of language. In D.S. Slobin (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. II: Theoretical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pica, T. & C. Doughty 1985. Input and interaction in the communicative language classroom: a comparison of teacher-fronted and group activities. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Rossier, P. 1976. Extroversion-introversion as a significant variable in the learning of oral English as a second language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Southern California. Schumann, J. 1978. Social and psychological processes in second language acquisition. In J. C. Richards (ed.), Understanding second and foreign language learning: issues and approaches. New York: Academic Press. Selinker, L. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209-230. Selinker, L., M. Swain, & G. Dumas 1975. The interlanguage hypothesis extended to children. Language Learning 25,139-152. Snow, C. & M. Hoefnagel-Hohle 1978. Age differences in second language acqui68
Second-language learning in children sition. In E. Hatch (ed.), Second language acquisition: a book of readings. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Snow, M. A., J. Galvan, & R. Campbell, 1980. The pilot class of the Culver City Spanish immersion program: a follow-up report, or whatever happened to the immersion class of 78? In K. Bailey, M. Long, & S. Peck (eds.), Second language acquisition studies. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Strong, M. 1982. Social styles and the second language acquisition of Spanishspeaking kindergartners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley. Swain, M. 1984. A review of immersion education in Canada: research and evaluation studies. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. 1988. Manipulating and complementing content teaching to maximize second language learning. TESOL Canada Journal, 6, 68-83. Swain, M. & B. Burnaby 1976. Personality characteristics and second language learning in young children: a pilot study. Working Papers on Bilingualismy 11,76-90. Swain, M. & S. Lapkin 1982. Evaluating bilingual education: a Canadian case study Clevedon, Avon, England: Multilingual Matters. Tarone, E. 1981. Some thoughts on the notion of communication strategy. TESOL Quarterly, 15, 285-295. van Lier, L. 1988. The classroom and the language learner. London: Longman. Wong Fillmore, L. 1976. The second time around: cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stanford University. 1979. Individual differences in second language acquisition. In C.J. Fillmore, W. S. Y. Wang & D. K. Kempler (eds.), Individual differences in language ability and language behavior. New York: Academic Press. 1982. Instructional language as linguistic input. In L. C. Wilkinson (ed.), Communicating in the classroom.New York: Academic Press. 1983. The language learner as an individual. In M. Clarke & J. Handscombe (eds.), In TESOL '82. Pacific perspectives on language learning and teaching. Washington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. 1989a. Language learning in social context: the view from research in second language learning. In R. Dietrich & C. Graumann (eds.), Language processing in social context. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers. 1989b. Teachability and second language acquisition. In R. Schiefelbusch & M. Rice (eds.), The teachability of language. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes. Wong Fillmore, L., P. Ammon, B. McLaughlin, & M. S. Ammon 1985. Learning English through bilingual instruction. Final Report to National Institute of Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
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4
Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children JIM CUMMINS
When children begin the acquisition of a second language (L2), whether in the home or at school, their cognitive resources clearly play a central role in the rapidity and ultimate success with which that language is acquired. Other individual factors, such as motivation, and contextual factors that determine amount and type of exposure to the second language, are also central to the acquisition process and in most situations are likely to interact with cognitive factors. I argue in this chapter that the process of second-language acquisition can be clarified by distinguishing between two dimensions of proficiency that relate in specific ways to determinants of the acquisition process, namely, attribute-based and input-based aspects of proficiency. Attribute-based aspects of proficiency refer to those dimensions of proficiency whose acquisition is strongly influenced by relatively stable attributes of the individual learner, for example, cognitive and personality variables. Input-based aspects of proficiency, on the other hand, are considerably less related to stable attributes of the individual than they are to the quality and quantity of L2 input received from the environment. In the initial stages of acquiring the L2 the distinction between attribute- and input-based dimensions of proficiency may not be apparent but, over time, the distinctive influences of attributes and input will result in differentiation between these dimensions. The chapter focuses in particular on the role of one aspect of the cognitive resources that children bring to L2 acquisition, namely, their first-language (LI) proficiency. The purpose is to elucidate the extent to which different aspects of LI and L2 proficiency are related in the L2 acquisition process. An initial step in this analysis is to clarify the dimensions of proficiency in one language. Dimensions of language proficiency
A number of investigators have pointed to a distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language as fundamental to understanding the nature of children's language and literacy development. The terms used 70
First- and second-language proficiency by different investigators have varied but the essential distinction refers to the extent to which the meaning being communicated is supported by contextual cues (such as the paralinguistic cues present in face-to-face interaction) or dependent largely on linguistic cues that are independent of the immediate communicative context. Among the distinctions that have been made are Bruner's (1975) distinction between communicative and analytic competence, Olson's (1977) utterance and text, Donaldson's (1978) embedded and disembedded thought and language, Bereiter and Scardamalia's (1981) conversation and composition, Cummins' (1981, 1984) contextembedded and context-reduced language proficiency (recently labeled simply as conversational- vs. academic-language proficiency; e.g., Cummins, 1989), and Snow et al.'s (this volume) contextualized and decontextualized use of language. Snow's terminology will be adopted in the present chapter. The distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language skills is consistent with the research of Biber (1986), who used psychometric analysis of an extremely large corpus of spoken and written textual material in order to uncover the basic dimensions underlying textual variation. Three major dimensions were labeled by Biber as interactive vs edited text, abstract vs situated content, and reported vs immediate style. The first dimension is described as follows: Thus, Factor 1 identifies a dimension which characterizes text produced under conditions of high personal involvement and real-time constraints (marked by low explicitness in the expression of meaning, high subordination and interactive features) - as opposed to texts produced under conditions permitting considerable editing and high explicitness of lexical content, but little interaction or personal involvement. (Biber, 1986, p. 385) The second factor reflects a ''detached formal style vs. a concrete colloquial one" (p. 396). Although this factor is correlated with the first factor, it can be empirically distinguished from it, as illustrated by professional letters, which, according to Biber's analysis, illustrate highly abstract texts with a high level of personal involvement. The third dimension "distinguishes texts with a primary narrative emphasis, marked by considerable reference to a removed situation, from those with non-narrative emphases (descriptive, expository, or other) marked by little reference to a removed situation but a high occurrence of present tense forms" (Biber, 1986, p. 396). Although Biber's three dimensions provide a more detailed analysis of the nature of language proficiency and use than the contextualized/decontextualized distinction (as would be expected in view of the very extensive range of spoken and written texts analyzed), it is clear that the distinctions highlighted in his dimensions are consistent with those distinguishing contextualized and decontextualized language. The narrower range of language 71
Jim Cummins used and/or required by developing children makes the contextualized/ decontextualized distinction adequate for purposes of this chapter. There is considerable empirical evidence for this distinction in the sphere of second-language acquisition. Several investigators (Collier, 1987; Cummins, 1981; Cummins & Nakajima, 1987) have reported that at least four years is required even for socioeconomically advantaged immigrant students to attain grade norms in English academic skills. Peer-appropriate conversational L2 skills are usually attained within a considerably shorter period (on average about two years of exposure to the L2 in the L2 context) (Cummins, 1984; Gonzalez, 1986; Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978). Both Snow etal. (this volume) and Gonzalez (1986) have reported that contextualized and decontextualized language skills are relatively independent of each other among bilingual students. In summary, the distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language use has been drawn by a considerable number of investigators and is supported empirically in a substantial number of studies. To what extent are each of these dimensions related across languages? In other words, to what extent is there evidence that students who manifest high levels of contextualized and decontextualized skills in their LI will develop similarly high levels of these skills in their L2? The relation between LI and L2 proficiency
Investigations of the relationships between LI and L2 contextualized and decontextualized language skills among immigrant students will be reviewed according to the background of the students involved. The three major categories are Finnish students in Sweden, Hispanic students in the United States, and Asian students in the United States and Canada. Then some additional evidence from bilingual programs involving both majority and minority students will be reviewed and finally we will examine studies involving adult L2 learners. Studies of immigrant students Finnish minority students in Sweden Two sets of studies involving Finnishbackground students in Sweden are relevant; the first set consists of studies carried out in the early 1970s synthesized by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976), while the second consists of more recent studies reported by Linde and Lofgren (1988). In reviewing these studies our purpose is to assess the extent to which students' acquisition of Swedish (L2) academic skills is related to their Finnish (LI) proficiency. In some studies, data are also reported on the relationships between contextualized (conver72
First- and second-language proficiency sational) and decontextualized (academic) language skills and these data will also be reviewed. The Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa report The studies synthesized by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) were carried out primarily in Olofstrom and Gothenburg and were designed to determine the level of Finnish immigrant students' academic achievement in both Finnish and Swedish and to explore some of the determinants of their achievement. A variety of tests in both languages were used; most assessed cognitive and academic abilities such as vocabulary knowledge, synonyms, antonyms, etc. as well as academic achievement in reading, math, and other school subjects. Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa summarize the Olofstrom data as follows: those who attended school in Finland (prior to immigration) approached the level of achievement of normal Swedish pupils . . . in the written comprehension test considerably more often than those who began school in Sweden. Those who attended school in Finland for at least three years did best. The explanation for this can perhaps be found in their better skills in their mother tongue, which laid the basis for understanding a test written in Swedish. Two years in a Finnish class in Sweden did not, on the other hand, make for as good a basis for learning Swedish as the corresponding time in Finland. (1976, pp. 65-66)
Significant correlations were observed for both the Olofstrom and Gothenburg samples between Finnish and Swedish verbal academic proficiency. For example, among the Olofstrom sample, the partial correlations (with length of residence held constant) between Finnish and Swedish for grades three to six students (N= 165) ranged from 0.20 (p<0.01) to 0.41 (p<0.001) (table 8, p. 60). For the grades seven to nine sample, five out of six partial correlations of Finnish with Swedish verbal academic skills were significant. A similar pattern of significant L1-L2 partial correlations was found for the Gothenburg sample (tables 11 and 12, pp. 64 and 65). The interdependence of LI and L2 verbal academic skills was further indicated by the fact that Finnish skills correlated about as highly with subject-matter achievement as did Swedish skills, despite the fact that all subjects were taught in Swedish (table 14, p. 68). The analyses presented by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa are limited by the absence of powerful statistical tools (such as path analysis) that would have allowed the interaction among predictor variables to have been assessed. From this perspective the studies reported by Linde and Lofgren present a more complete picture of factors involved in predicting L2 academic achievement. The Linde and Lofgren studies. Linde and Lofgren used path-analysis procedures to fit causal models to data on Finnish children's achievement 73
Jim Cummins in Swedish schools. The first study was longitudinal in nature and involved 32 grade-three children attending a bilingual instructional program. Children's proficiency in Finnish on entry to school was strongly related to achievement at the grade-three level (path coefficient 0.66) while initial Swedish proficiency was related to a lesser level (path coefficient 0.26). A positive relation between Finnish and Swedish language skills was also observed (path coefficient 0.36). The second and third studies involved 319 and 157 Finnish-background grade-six students respectively. In both studies a positive relation between Finnish and Swedish verbal academic proficiency was reported (path coefficients 0.30 and 0.33 respectively). In spite of these positive relations, a negative relation was observed between attendance at Finnish classes and Swedish proficiency. This may be partially a function of the fact that students who have been in Sweden for less time are more likely to be in Finnishmedium classes. Length of time in Sweden was not assessed in either of these two studies but was strongly related to Swedish proficiency in the first study. The fourth study involved 388 grade-eight students and again reported a positive relation between Finnish and Swedish proficiency (path coefficient 0.24). Unlike the grade-six studies, no negative relation was observed between amount of Finnish-medium instruction and Swedish proficiency. In other words, students instructed primarily through Finnish in the elementary school were performing as well in Swedish as those whose instruction had been largely through Swedish. As in the grade-six studies, however, a limitation of this study is that length of residence in Sweden was not included as a variable in the analysis. It should be noted that the relation between LI and L2 in these studies cannot be accounted for by specific transfer of linguistic elements across languages since Finnish and Swedish are not closely related to each other. In summary, in the Scandinavian studies a significant positive relation between Finnish and Swedish verbal academic proficiency is consistently obtained and transfer of academic skills across languages is evident in the fact that instruction through Finnish entails no long-term lag in the development of Swedish academic skills. Both of these sets of findings are consistent with the postulation of a moderate degree of interdependeace between LI and L2 verbal academic proficiency in the L2 acquisition process.
Hispanic students in the United States Two longitudinal studies provide strong support for the notion of linguistic interdependence. Ramirez (1985) followed seventy-five Hispanic elementary-school students in Newark, New Jersey, enroled in bilingual programs for three years. It was found that Spanish and English verbal academic language scores loaded on one single 74
First- and second-language proficiency factor over the three years of data collection. Only students with relatively high levels of Spanish academic proficiency (as assessed by the C.T.B.S. Espanol) on entry to the program developed high levels of English proficiency (as assessed by the Maculaitis English proficiency test). Hakuta and Diaz (1985) with a similar sample of Hispanic students found an increasing correlation between English and Spanish academic skills over time. Between kindergarten and third grade the correlation between English and Spanish went from 0 to 0.68. The low crosslingual relationship at the kindergarten level is likely to be due to the varied length of residence of the students and their parents in the United States, which would result in varying levels of English proficiency at the start of school. An evaluation study of five schools attempting to implement the Theoretical Framework for the Education of Language Minority Students developed by the California State Department of Education (1981) showed consistently higher correlations between English and Spanish reading skills (range r = 0.60-0.74) than between English reading and oral language skills (range r = 0.36-0.59) (California State Department of Education, 1985). Oral language skills were assessed by a detailed rating scale completed by teachers. In these analyses scores were broken down by months in the program (1-12 months through 73-84). It was found that the relation between LI and L2 reading became stronger as English oral communicative skills grew stronger (r = 0.71, N= 190 for students in the highest category of English oral skills). A well-designed study carried out by Gonzalez (1986) with Hispanic immigrant children similarly demonstrated a considerably stronger relationship between English and Spanish reading skills than between English reading skills and English oral communicative skills. Two groups of grade-six students attending a bilingual program were compared on English and Spanish measures: thirty-four students who were born and schooled for at least two years in Mexico prior to emigrating to the United States and thirty-eight students who were born in Mexico but emigrated to the United States before beginning school. Both groups were of low socioeconomic status. It was found that the Mexican-schooled group performed significantly better on both Spanish and English reading tasks (assessed by means of the C.T.B.S. Espanol and Stanford Reading Test respectively) than the group schooled entirely in the United States. The U.S.-schooled group outperformed the Mexican-schooled group on an English oral-language measure (the Bilingual Syntax Measure (B.S.M.) II) and on ratings of English communicative proficiency. Both groups showed a high level of competence in conversational aspects of Spanish proficiency, with the Mexican-schooled group scoring somewhat higher on the Spanish B.S.M. II and the U.S.-schooled group being rated more fluent in Spanish communicative skills. In the total sample, Spanish and English reading comprehen75
Jim Cummins sion scores showed a correlation of 0.55 (/?<0.01) with each other but neither reading score was significantly correlated with ratings of communicative competence. Gonzalez concluded that the academic foundation developed by the Mexican-schooled students transferred to the acquisition of English academic skills, giving them an advantage over their U.S.schooled peers, despite the fact that both groups attended the same bilingual program.1 An interesting aspect of Gonzalez' findings is that high crosslingual correlations were obtained between the ratings of Spanish and English communicative skills, suggesting transference of some aspects of oral-language skills in addition to academic-language skills. The studies outlined above used standardized reading tests as the major dependent variables in both English and Spanish. However, similar patterns of crosslingual transfer were observed in several other studies that used more authentic measures of verbal academic skills. Goldman (1985), for example, examined the retelling of narratives in both English and Spanish by bilingual children and compared these retellings with those of a monolingual group presented with narratives in English only. Children were in kindergarten through sixth grade. It was found that children used similar comprehension strategies whether they were exposed to the story in their LI or L2. The bilingual children performed as well in English as their monolingual peers in grades three, four, five, and six, although differences in favor of the monolingual children were observed in the lower grades. Carlisle (1986) examined the writing development of grades four and six Anglo students in regular programs and Hispanic students in either submersion or bilingual programs. An analysis of covariance revealed an advantage for the bilingual-program students in comparison to the submersion-program students in English rhetorical effectiveness, syntactic maturity, and productivity, although both groups performed less well than the Anglo students in regular programs on rhetorical effectiveness and overall quality of writing. A multiple regression analysis revealed a significant relationship between rhetorical effectiveness in Spanish and rhetorical effectiveness in English. A number of other studies have reported significant correlations between Spanish and English reading skills among Hispanic students in the United States. For example, a study of seventy sixth-grade Hispanic students in a bilingual program in Rochester, New York, showed a correlation of 0.59 between the Degrees of Reading Power test (a modified multiple-choice cloze procedure) in English and Spanish (Bull, 1986). Fradd (1983) similarly reported a significant correlation of 0.41 (p<0.01) between Spanish and English reading skills among forty-one Cuban-background high-school students in Florida. In summary, the findings of studies involving Hispanic students in the United States are consistent with those of Scandinavian researchers in point76
First- and second-language proficiency ing to a moderate degree of interdependence between minority students' LI and L2 academic skills. Asian students in Canada and the United States Genesee (1979) has reported that correlations between LI and L2 reading skills tend to be lower (although still significant) when the orthographies of the two languages are dissimilar. For example, his studies of bilingual and trilingual immersion programs found lower correlations between Hebrew and both English and French than between these latter two languages themselves. Languages such as Chinese and Japanese differ even more significantly from English in their writing systems. Consequently, investigations of L l L2 relationships involving these languages pose a stringent test for the interdependence hypothesis. Several studies involving Asian immigrant students to North America have been carried out that suggest that cognitive and personality attributes of individual learners, in particular their literate competence in LI, contribute significantly to the acquisition of certain aspects of L2, despite the dissimilarity of languages and writing systems. Cummins et al. (1984) set out explicitly to test the interdependence hypothesis in a study of ninety-one Japanese and forty-five Vietnamesebackground students in Toronto. The Japanese students were the children of temporary residents who were in Canada for business or professional reasons, whereas the Vietnamese sample consisted of refugee students. The Japanese students attended a Saturday Japanese school which aimed to help students keep up with the curriculum in Japan in order to ease scholastic reintegration when they returned (often after as much as five to six years of residence abroad). Students were selected from grades two to three and five to six (Canadian grades) in order to allow the effects of length of residence (L.O.R.) to be separated from age of arrival (A.O. A.). Thus, a grade-two student with two years L.O.R. has an A.O. A. of about five years whereas the A.O.A. for a grade-six student with two years L.O.R. is about nine years. All the Vietnamese sample were recent arrivals (L.O.R. 5-22 months) and ranged in age between nine and seventeen years. Thus, all the sample had received at least some education in Vietnamese prior to immigration to Canada. The dependent variables for the Japanese group consisted of five English decontextualized verbal academic measures (two reading measures from the grade-two Gates McGinitie reading tests and three oral-language tasks) and contextualized measures derived from ratings of student interviews (administered to a subsample, n = 59). Students were also interviewed in Japanese and were administered a Japanese standardized diagnostic reading measure. A factor analysis of English measures in the Japanese study revealed three factors: (1) a grammatical-competence factor; (2) an interactionalstyle factor related to the amount of elaboration and detail volunteered 77
Jim Cummins by students in the interview; and (3) a decontextualized or verbal academiccompetence factor. Regression analyses of these three factor scores on L2 exposure (i.e., L.O.R.) and personal attribute variables (e.g., parent ratings of student personality traits) showed a strong relationship between L.O.R. and all three dimensions. The proportion of explained variance ranged from 0.26 for the English grammatical factor to 0.17 for the verbal academic factor with the interactional-style factor in an intermediate position (R square = 0.21). A block of variables representing LI cognitive/ academic attributes of the students (e.g., Japanese reading T.-score, A.O.A. in Canada) was entered next into the equation. This block added only 3 percent and 6 percent to the explained variance for L2 grammatical competence and interactional style but 18 percent explained variance for the L2 verbal academic factor. Next, a block representing Japanese interactional style and parental ratings of their children's extraversion-introversion was added. This block accounted for only 4 percent and 2 percent increment to explained variance for L2 grammatical competence and verbal academic abilities but 17 percent increment for the English interactional-style factor. In other words, variables related to students' LI cognitive and literacy skills contributed significantly to the development of L2 cognitive and literacy skills while interactional-style dimensions in LI and L2 were closely related to personality attributes of the students. In contrast to the role individual attributes of the students played in the development of these aspects of L2 proficiency, grammatical proficiency in L2 was most significantly influenced by variables related to the amount of L2 input that students received (i.e., L.O.R.). We will return to this distinction between attribute-based and input-based predictors of L2 proficiency in a later section. The interdependence hypothesis was also supported in the Vietnamese study, where performance on a Vietnamese antonyms measure together with students' age accounted for 61 percent of the variance in an English antonyms measure. Probably due to the restricted range for L.O.R. among the Vietnamese sample, L.O.R. accounted for only 6 percent of the variance in the English antonyms measure when entered first into the regression equation. A more recent study of 273 grades two to eight Japanese students in Toronto (Cummins & Nakajima, 1987) reported findings consistent with those of the previous study. English and Japanese standardized measures of reading were administered to the sample together with assessments of writing skills in both languages. L.O.R. accounted for 35 percent of the variance in English reading scores with the verbal academic block (Japanese reading, A.O.A. and age) accounting for an additional 20 percent. Minimal variance was accounted for by these variables on measures of English writing (e.g. holistic ratings of writing quality and spelling errors). It was poss78
First- and second-language proficiency ible to examine the relationship between English and Japanese writing measures for a subsample (n = 70). A number of Japanese writing variables related significantly to overall quality of English writing and to English spelling. Among the strongest relationships was that between Japanese spelling (katakana) and English spelling. This relationship was independent of more general cognitive/academic variables such as Japanese reading proficiency and age. Consistent results are also reported by Iwasaki (1981) in a study of Japanese children in New York. She investigated the effect of initial age of intensive exposure to L2 and transferability of cognitive/academic skills across languages among grades seven and eight students in both full-time (N = 76) and part-time (N = 72) Japanese schools. The Gates McGinitie level E reading-comprehension test Normal Curve Equivalent scores were used as the dependent measure for English cognitive/academic proficiency. Japanese measures were developed by the investigator and combined into grade-normed scores so that the grades seven and eight data could be combined. Length of local schooling (an index of L.O.R.) was strongly related to English reading performance, accounting for 52 per cent of the variance in the regression equation (N=106). Performance on the Japanese measures added an additional 9 percent (p<0.001) to the explanation of variance. A chi-square analysis for thirty-nine students with more than twenty-seven months of local schooling showed a significant (p<0.01) relationship between Japanese and English proficiency. For example, of those who were in the high and medium ranges in Japanese proficiency eighteen were above the mean in English reading and only six below the mean. Of those low in Japanese proficiency only four were above the mean in English compared to eleven below the mean. Iwasaki also reported that grade-norm acquisition of English reading occurred at twenty-seven months of local schooling, suggesting an acquisition process that appears more rapid than the forty-eight months L.O.R. required by similar economically advantaged Japanese students in Toronto. The difference may be due, in part, to the non-equivalence of L.O.R. and length of local schooling indices. In short, moderately strong relationships are observed between reading performance in Japanese and English despite the differences in writing systems. Some crosslingual relationships are also evident in Japanese and English writing skills, although these are less clear-cut than those observed for reading. The final study to be examined in this section focuses on the bilingual development in English and Chinese of 112 grades four to six Chinese-background students in Seattle. This study, prepared by fhe Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (S.E.D.L.) (Hoover, 1983), included a large number of English oral language and literacy variables 79
Jim Cummins as well as a measure of LI (Cantonese) reading skills. Here we are primarily concerned with predictors of children's performance on the Interactive Reading Assessment System (IRAS2) developed by Calfee and Calfee (1979). Part of the sample had started schooling in the United States and had been in a Chinese-English bilingual program, while the remainder had immigrated to the United States after the start of formal schooling and had received varying amounts of LI literacy instruction abroad. Thus, it is possible to examine L1-L2 relationships for these two groups separately. For the U.S.-schooled students (n = 66) a significant positive correlation was found between IRAS performance and both amount of L2 instruction (r = 0.28, M = 112) and amount of LI instruction (r = 0.24, n = 112). The effect of bilingual instruction can be seen in the difference between subgroups who had minimal bilingual instruction (0-2 semesters, IRAS mean = 6.2) and those who had substantial amounts of bilingual instruction (8 semesters, IRAS mean = 7.5). For this group regression analyses showed length of residence in the U.S.A. accounting for 19 percent of the variance in IRAS scores, while an LI cognitive/academic block consisting of amount of bilingual instruction, Cantonese IRAS, and age of arrival in the U.S.A. accounted for an additional 14 percent. Of these latter variables only amount of bilingual instruction attains significance (p<0.05), while the other two variables entered subsequently approach significance (see Cummins, 1983; Hoover, 1983). For the initially foreign-schooled group, L.O.R. explained 29 percent of the variance in English IRAS performance while the LI cognitive/academic block explained almost 11 percent. Of the LI cognitive/academic block, only amount of LI instruction abroad attained significance (p = 0.05), accounting individually for 6 percent of the variance. The fact that Cantonese reading proficiency does not attain significance in this equation can be attributed to its overlap with LI instruction, since its partial correlation with English IRAS attains significance after L.O.R. is initially entered into the equation (r = 0.23, /?<0.02) but drops to insignificance after amount of LI instruction is entered. In summary, although the amount of variance accounted for by variables reflective of LI cognitive/academic proficiency is less than that accounted for by L.O.R. for both foreign-and U.S.-schooled groups (11 percent and 14 percent respectively), the effect does attain statistical significance and is consistent with the pattern observed for Japanese students in the Toronto studies. Thesefindingsappear consistent with Genesee's (1979) observation that the transfer of reading skills from LI to L2, while significant, is less when the languages are very dissimilar than is the case with similar languages. Sociocultural variables such as motivation to maintain and develop literacy skills in Chinese and Japanese are also likely to affect the relation between LI and L2 literacy skills. 80
First- and second-language proficiency Additional studies of bilingual students Several additional studies can be briefly noted. Falter (1988) reported correlations between English and French reading and writing tasks among 145 grade-five students in French immersion programs in Northern Ontario. The intercorrelations between English and French standardized reading, cloze, and writing measures were 0.59, 0.61, and 0.47 respectively. All were significant beyond the 0.001 level. Davidson, Kline, and Snow (1986) reported that decontextualized language skills (operationally defined as ability to give definitions) were highly correlated across languages in French-English bilingual children. Correlations across languages were stronger than correlations between decontextualized and contextualized skills within languages. This finding parallels that of the California State Department of Education (1985) reviewed above. Snow (this volume) also reports a strong relationship of definitional ability to reading achievement. Geva and Ryan (1987) investigated the interdependence hypothesis as part of a study of cognitive, memory, and linguistic-processing predictors of L2 reading development. Subjects were seventy-three grade five to seven children attending a bilingual Hebrew-English day school in Toronto. The test battery included measures of non-verbal intelligence, linguistic proficiency in LI (English reading, vocabulary, and clause-completion tasks3), linguistic proficiency in L2 (Hebrew oral-proficiency ratings and reading ability), and memory measures in LI and L2. The results pointed to an important role for memory processes in performing linguistic tasks in L2 as a result of the fact that L2 linguistic processing is less automatized than LI processing. A significant correlation (r = 0.37, /?<0.001) was found between the English clause-completion task and Hebrew reading, suggesting that those children who can more systematically employ executive-control functions in their LI are more likely to do so in their L2 as well. This correlation maintained significance (r = 0.26) even when grade and non-verbal intelligence were partialled out. Strong correlations were also observed between verbal memory-span tasks in Hebrew and English. However, the relationship between Hebrew and English reading was not significant. Geva and Ryan interpret these results as supporting the interdependence hypothesis, but caution that the "common underlying proficiency" involves more than just non-verbal intelligence; linguistic analytic skills or executive functions and memory span represent independent components of the common underlying proficiency." The lack of significant relationship between Hebrew and English reading in the Geva and Ryan study cannot be attributed to unique characteristics of the Hebrew language in view of the fact that Kemp (1984) reported that Hebrew (LI) cognitive/academic abilities accounted for 48 percent 81
Jim Cummins of the variance in English cognitive academic skills among 196 seventhgrade Israeli students. Malakoff (1988) reported crosslingual relationships of French-English bilingual students' performance on a verbal-analogies task. The students were sixth graders attending the International School of Geneva. Eighteen of the students were attending a program that carried out instruction primarily in English and twenty-four were in a predominantly French-language program. The verbal analogies were divided into easy and hard sets in both French and English. For the easy task the correlations between performance in French and English were r = 0.56 (/?<0.01) for the Englishlanguage program and r = 0.77 (p<0.001) for the French-language program group. For the hard analogies the correlations were also significant: r = 0.78 (p<0.001) for the English language program and r = 0.58 (p<0.01) for the French-language program. Canale, Frennette, and Belanger (1987) tested the extent to which the interdependence hypothesis applied to writing skills among a sample of grades nine and ten Franco-Ontarian students who were being educated predominantly through French. A sample of 128 essays (64 English, 64 French) written by thirty-two students equally divided between narrative and expository genres and randomly drawn from a larger data base of student writing formed the data for the study. It was found that crosslingual correlations between analytic scores were highly significant for the same mode of writing (r = 0.77 for narratives, r = 0.78 for expositions). Ho (1987) has reviewed three studies carried out in Singapore that examined crosslingual interdependence among English-Chinese (N = 296), English-Malay (7V = 91), and English-Tamil (N = 28) bilinguals. Significant correlations were obtained for verbal/academic performance among the Chinese and Tamil bilinguals (r = 0.21, p<0.01, and r = 0.56, p<0.0l respectively) but the correlation for the Malay group was not significant. This latter finding was attributed to the mixed nature of the Malay learners; when the group was separated into those of Malay ethnic origin and those of non-Malay origin the correlations were 0.28 (p<0.05) and —0.25 (n.s.) respectively for these two groups. The negative correlation in the latter group was attributed to the diversity of language background and abilities in this group. In summary, in these studies a moderately significant correlation was observed between languages that are quite dissimilar in orthography, syntax, and directionality. A European study described by McLaughlin (1986) also suggests that interdependence of academic skills operates across languages that are quite dissimilar, in this case Turkish and German. The study carried out by Rehbein (1984) found that 82
First- and second-language proficiency the ability of Turkish children to deal with complex texts in German was affected by their ability to understand these texts in their first language. Rehbein's investigations suggest that there is a strong developmental interrelationship between the bilingual child's two languages and that the conceptual information and discourse strategies acquired in the first language transfer to the second. (McLaughlin, 1986, pp. 34-35)
Finally, a study of 191 grade-seven Portuguese-background students in Toronto showed that measures of students' discourse proficiency (i.e., judgments regarding coherence and cohesiveness of text) in Portuguese and English were strongly interrelated (r = 0.54, p<0.001, n = 65). The English discourse measure loaded on a Portuguese proficiency dimension in a principal components analysis carried out on the data (Cummins, Lopes, & King, 1988). Studies of adult second-language learners Several studies of adult L2 learners support the interdependence hypothesis. Salgado (1988), for example, reported a correlation of 0.58 (p<0.001) between reading scores in Spanish and English among 201 Hispanic-community-college students in the New York area. In a sample of 182 Hispaniccommunity college students in Houston, Guerra (1984) studied the relationship between students' ability to judge and correct syntactic errors in English and their ability to judge and correct similar types of syntactic errors in Spanish. Other variables in the analysis included length of residence in the United States and amount of instruction in English as a second language (E.S.L.). Guerra reported that Spanish language skills and years of schooling in Spanish significantly predicted students' ability to recognize errors in English. In predicting ability to correct errors in English, E.S.L. instruction was equally significant to these variables. The ability to recognize and correct syntactic acceptability in Spanish was the highest predictor of the same ability in the second language (English). The interdependence notion is also supported in one of the few studies to focus on cognitive processes and text production (Cumming, 1987). The study assessed the relationship of writing expertise and second-language proficiency to adults' writing performance in E.S.L. Both writing expertise and second-language proficiency accounted for large proportions of variance in the qualities of E.S.L. texts and composing behaviors. These effects were independent of each other, however, suggesting that they are psychologically distinct abilities. The relation of these findings to the interdependence hypothesis is that writing expertise is common across languages but for effective writing performance in an L2 both expertise and specific knowledge of the L2 are required. As expressed by Cumming: the present research has identified the empirical existence of certain cognitive abilities entailed in writing expertise - problem solving strategies, attention to complex 83
Jim Cummins aspects of writing while making decisions, and the qualities of content and discourse organization in compositions - which are not related directly to second language proficiency but which appear integral to effective performance in second language writing. (1987, p. 175)
Writing expertise is viewed as a central cognitive ability with secondlanguage proficiency an additive factor that facilitates the operation of writing expertise in a new domain and possibly enhances writing expertise in subtle ways. In Cumming's study second-language proficiency was very closely related to length of residence in an English-speaking milieu, but both these variables were less fundamentally related to L2 composing behavior than was their writing expertise that manifested itself in both languages. Conclusion The data reviewed in this chapter suggest that both attributes of the individual learner and aspects of the input received by the learner contribute in important ways to the development of different aspects of L2 proficiency. The importance of quantity of input is clearly indicated by the consistently strong relationships observed between length of residence and L2 acquisition. However, L.O.R. was not equally related to all aspects of proficiency. For example, in the Cummins et al. (1984) study, acquisition of L2 conversational syntax was considerably more dependent on L.O.R. than either L2 academic proficiency or interactional style. Cognitive and personality attributes of the individual contributed as much to the explanation of variance in these dimensions as did L.O.R. These learner attributes, however, were unrelated to individual differences in L2 conversational syntax. In general, moderately strong crosslingual relationships are observed for attribute-based aspects of LI and L2 proficiency as a result of the fact that underlying attributes of the individual manifest themselves in the individual's performance in both languages. Within the sphere of cognitive attributes, the data show consistent moderate relationships between decontextualized aspects of LI and L2 proficiency in studies carried out in a wide variety of sociolinguistic situations and involving subjects ranging in age from early childhood to adult. Relationships tend to be somewhat smaller, albeit still statistically significant, in the case of languages that differ markedly in writing systems. Although the most consistent relationships are found in the sphere of decontextualized language proficiency, some crosslingual relationships were also observed in aspects of contextualized language proficiency that reflect particular learner attributes (e.g., interactional style). In short, the crosslingual relationships for academic or decontextualized aspects of proficiency are a function of the fact that both LI and L2 proficiencies are subsumed by cognitive attributes of the learner, while 84
First- and second-language proficiency
the learner's personality attributes are manifested in the cross-lingual relationship of interactional style. As Geva and Ryan (1987) suggest, it may be possible to develop a more refined model of the cognitive attributes that subsume LI and L2 decontextualized abilities; for example, by distinguishing the contribution of non-verbal ability, verbal analytic functions, memory span, etc. This direction is consistent with Cumming's (1987) conclusion that writing expertise represents a specific underlying competence that manifests itself in writing performance in both languages and is not reducible to other underlying cognitive attributes such as verbal or nonverbal I. Q. It should be emphasized that the distinction between attribute-based and input-based aspects of proficiency is a relative one in that individual learner attributes will be involved in most aspects of L2 learning to a greater or lesser extent and appropriate input is clearly essential for development of all aspects of proficiency. Thus, attributes and input are not totally independent of each other, as illustrated by the fact that highly motivated individuals are likely to seek out a greater amount of input than those less motivated. The point is, however, that the relative importance of attributes and input will vary for different aspects of the L2. The relatively weak relationship between contextualized and decontextualized (or conversational and academic) aspects of proficiency in a language can thus be understood as a function of the distinction between attribute-based and input-based aspects of proficiency. A weak relationship is observed either because different attributes are involved (e.g., cognition and personality) or because input characteristics are relatively more significant for acquisition (e.g., of L2 conversational syntax) than individual attributes. Clearly, the acquisition context must be considered also in that acquisition of L2 syntax may be considerably more dependent on cognitive attributes in formal classroom contexts than in naturalistic settings, where quantity and quality of input are primary determinants of acquisition. How does the attribute-based/input-based distinction relate to the common distinction made between contextualized and decontextualized aspects of proficiency and to Biber's three dimensions of language use? Biber's dimensions and the contextualized/decontextualized distinction refer primarily to characteristics of the language itself (i.e., to the type of input the learner receives) rather than to characteristics of the learner or user of the language. In these formulations, no relationship is posited between attributes of the learner and the development of proficiency in different dimensions of language use (e.g., contextualized/decontextualized). The present conceptualization goes beyond these distinctions to posit relationships that are predictable, at least in principle, between learner attributes and characteristics of the language. Thus, the strong crosslingual relationship between LI and L2 decontextualized language skills found 85
Jim Cummins in the research of Snow and her colleagues is interpreted as a function of the fact that decontextualized skills in LI and L2 reflect underlying cognitive attributes of the individual that manifest themselves in both languages. As the Cummins et al. (1984) study suggests, certain aspects of contextuaiized language skills are also reflective of underlying personality attributes, whereas for others (e.g., conversational syntax) the role of quality and quantity of input largely overshadows individual difference factors. Predictions that emerge from this conceptualization are (1) consistent crosslingual relationships between aspects of LI and L2 are reflective of underlying attributes of the individual in addition to characteristics of L2 input; and (2) aspects of LI and L2 proficiency that are unrelated across languages are also largely unrelated to underlying individual difference dimensions (e.g., cognition, personality) but strongly related to quality and/or quantity of L2 input received by the learner. Research directions suggested by this approach include refining the attribute dimensions that can be distinguished within the more general categories of cognition and personality and, in turn, the crosslingual aspects of language proficiency that are subsumed by these underlying attribute dimensions. Notes 1.
2. 3.
Findings reported by Baral (1979) appear at first sight inconsistent with the findings of Gonzalez' study. Baral reported that immigrant students who had at least two years of schooling in Mexico performed significantly lower in English academic skills than Mexican-American students born in the United States. However, the socioeconomic status of the immigrant students was significantly lower than that of the native-born students and their length of residence in the United States (two to five years) is likely to have been insufficient to catch up with the native-born students. IRAS scores can be read as approximations of grade equivalent scores. The clause-comple.tion task involved items such as "She cooked the potatoes and meat for him because (a) she wishes to be helpful; (b) he could fly airplanes; (c) he had eaten supper; (d) she wanted to help him." It was designed to assess children's level of analyzed linguistic knowledge in LI (see Bialystok & Ryan, 1985).
References Baral, D. P. 1979. Academic achievement of recent immigrants from Mexico. NABE Journal, 3, 1-13. Bereiter, C. & M. Scardamalia 1981. From conversation to composition: the role of instruction in a developmental process. In R. Glaser (ed.), Advances in instructional psychology, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 86
First- and second-language proficiency Bialystok, E. & E. B. Ryan 1985. Towards a definition of metalinguistic skill. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 57, 229-251. Biber, D. 1986. Spoken and written textual dimensions in English: resolving the contradictory findings. Language, 62, 384-414. Bruner, J. S. 1975. Language as an instrument of thought. In A. Davies (ed.), Problems of language and learning, London: Heinemann. Bull, D. C. 1986. An evaluation of the modified cloze procedure as a measure of transferability of reading comprehension in bilingual children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo. Calfee, R. C. & K. H. Calfee 1979. Interactive reading assessment system. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. California State Department of Education 1981. Schooling and language minority students: a theoretical framework. California State University, Los Angeles. California State Department of Education 1985. Case studies in bilingual education: first year report. Federal Grant #G008303723. Sacramento: California State Department of Education. Canale, M., N. Frennette, & M. Belanger 1987. Evaluation of minority students writing in first and second languages. In J. Fine (ed.), Second language discourse: a textbook of current research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Carlisle, R. S. 1986. The writing of Anglo and Hispanic fourth and sixth graders in regular, submersion and bilingual programs. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Collier, V. P. 1987. Age and rate of acquisition of second language for academic purposes. TESOL Quarterly, 21, 617-641. Cumming, A. 1987. Writing expertise and second language proficiency in ESL writing performance. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto. Cummins, J. 1981. The role of primary language development in promoting educational success for language minority students. In California State Department of Education (ed.), Schooling and language minority students: a theoretical framework. Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center, California State University, Los Angeles. 1983. Policy report: language and literacy learning in bilingual instruction. A policy review of the Southwest Educational Laboratory Study submitted to the National Institute of Education. 1984. Bilingualism and special education: issues in assessment and pedagogy. Clevedon, Avon, England: Multilingual Matters. 1989. Empowering minority students. Sacramento, CA: California Association for Bilingual Education. Cummins, J. & K. Nakajima 1987. Age of arrival, length of residence, and interdependence of literacy skills among Japanese immigrant students. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain (eds.), The development of bilingual proficiency. Vol. Ill: Social context and age. Final report submitted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Cummins, J., J. Lopes, & M. L. King 1988. The language use patterns, language 87
Jim Cummins attitudes, and bilingual proficiency of Portuguese Canadian children in Toronto. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain (eds.), The development ofbilingual proficiency. Vol. Ill: Social context and age. Final report submitted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Cummins, J., M. Swain, K. Nakajima, J. Handscombe, D. Green, & C. Tran. 1984. Linguistic interdependence among Japanese and Vietnamese immigrant students. In C. Rivera (ed.), Communicative competence approaches to language proficiency assessment: research and application. Clevedon, Avon, England: Multilingual Matters. Davidson, R. G., S. P. Kline, & C. E. Snow 1986. Definitions and definite noun phrases: indicators of children's decontextualized language skills. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 1, 37-48. Donaldson, M. 1978. Children's minds. Glasgow: Collins. Falter, P. 1988. The effect of metalinguistic instruction on the bilingual literacy skills of selected grade 5 French immersion children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto, Toronto. Fradd, S. H. 1983. Language acquisition of 1980 Cuban immigrant junior high school students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Florida. Genesee, F. 1979. Acquisition of reading skills in immersion programs. Foreign Language Annals, 72,71-77. Geva, E. & E. Ryan 1987. Linguistic knowledge and cognitive demands for academic skills in first and second language. Paper presented at the meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Vancouver. Goldman, S. R. 1985. Utilization of knowledge acquired through the first language in comprehending a second language: Narrative comprehension by SpanishEnglish speakers. Report submitted to the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs, Washington, DC. Gonzalez, L. A. 1986. The effects of first language education on the second language and academic achievement of Mexican immigrant elementary school children in the United States. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Guerra, V. 1984. Predictors of second language learners' error judgements in written English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Corpus Christi State University. Hakuta, K. & R. M. Diaz 1985. The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability: a critical discussion and some new longitudinal data. In K.E. Nelson (ed.), Children's language, vol.V. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ho, W. K. 1987. Proficiency across languages: an overview. In W. K. Leong, N. E. Guan, K. Abdullah, S. P. Thinnappan, & N. Govindasamy (eds.), The bilingual ability of a sample of primary three pupils: a collection of three papers. Singapore: Institute of Education. Hoover, W. 1983. Language and literacy learning in bilingual instruction. Cantonese Site Analytic study. Final report submitted to the National Institute of Education. Iwasaki, M. 1981. A study of sociological and developmental factors in first language 88
First- and second-language proficiency maintenance and second language acquisition of kaigaishijo in New York. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Hawaii. Kemp, J. 1984. Native language knowledge as a predictor of success in learning a foreign language with special reference to a disadvantaged population. Unpublished master's thesis, Tel-Aviv University. Linde, S. G. & H. Lofgren 1988. The relationship between medium of instruction and school achievement for Finnish-speaking students in Sweden. Language, Culture and Cognition, / , 131-146. McLaughlin, B. 1986. Multilingual education: theory east and west. In B. Spolsky (ed.), Language and education in multilingual settings. Clevedon, Avon, England: Multilingual Matters. Malakoff, M. 1988. The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 17-38. Olson, D. R. 1977. From utterance to text: the bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257-281. Ramirez, C. M. 1985. Bilingual education and language interdependence: Cummins and beyond. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yeshiva University. Rehbein, J. 1984. Diskurs und Verstehen: Zur Role der Muttersprache bei der Textarbeitung in der Zweitsprache. University of Hamburg. Salgado, L. J. 1988. Language proficiency and retention among Hispanic students in community colleges. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Seton Hall University. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. & P. Toukomaa 1976. Teaching migrant children's mother tongue and learning the language of the host country in the context of the sociocultural situation of the migrant family. Helsinki: The Finnish National Commission for UNESCO. Snow, D. E. & M. Hoefnagel-Hohle 1978. The critical period for language acquisition: evidence from second language learning. Child Development, 49, 1114-1128.
89
5
Giving formal definitions: a linguistic or metalinguistic skill?1 CATHERINE E. SNOW, HERLINDA CANCINO, JEANNE DE TEMPLE, and SARA SCHLEY
As children go farther and farther in school, they are required to devote relatively more and more attention to the form as compared to the content of their language productions. Tasks which might seem straightforwardly communicative and linguistic, such as writing paragraphs, telling stories, answering comprehension questions, and explaining how things work, must increasingly also be dealt with as metalinguistic problems as form becomes a codeterminant of success along with content. One such task, which we will argue shifts from being linguistic to metalinguistic in the course of the elementary grades, is defining words. Young children very reasonably respond to a question like "What's a hat?" with "You wear it," and such a response is tolerated if the child is young enough. 2 Older children, on the other hand, are expected to respond to such questions by giving "formal definitions," which conform to particular standards for form as well as for content, for example, "A hat is an article of clothing worn on the head." Definitions, though a rather specialized speech genre, are of both theoretical and practical interest to students of language development. In school settings, definitions are often requested of children, and giving definitions (or having children look them up in dictionaries and copy them) is a standard and frequent technique for vocabulary training. Theoretically, definitions are interesting because they constitute one example of what has been referred to as decontextualized language use - language used in ways that eschew reliance on shared social and physical context in favor of reliance on a context created through the language itself. A good defini tion avoids exploiting the availability of information that happens to be shared between speaker and hearer, restricting itself instead to information shared by the entire speech community. Furthermore, giving good definitions requires analyzing one's own knowledge of word meaning to distinguish "definitional" from incidental information about the target concept, as well as control of the conventional form for giving definitions (a copula, a superordinate, a restrictive complement). As such, giving 90
Giving formal definitions formal definitions constitutes a metalinguistic task in which both analysis of knowledge and control of processing, Bialystok and Ryan's (1985) terms, are crucial to success. Evidence that success in giving definitions has a metalinguistic component derives from an analysis of what constitutes a "good definition" in comparison to what constitutes a communicatively effective one. Perhaps the most communicatively transparent definitions are ostensive ("What's a clock?" - "That thing on the wall"), but such highly contextualized definitions do not resemble the formal, "Aristotelian" definitions typically required of children at school ("A clock is a machine that tells time"). Formal definitions typically identify a superordinate class to which the definiendum belongs, and add relevant information about restrictions on membership in that class, while avoiding specific or idiosyncratic information that may be true but not central (e.g., can be made of wood or metal; can be wind-up, electric, or battery-operated; some have alarms). In order to give a good formal definition, one must analyze all one knows about a concept to separate the crucial from the irrelevant information. Growth in the ability to perform this sort of analysis of one's own knowledge may, thus, lie at the heart of the development of the ability to give good definitions. We know that children have considerable difficulty either in giving or in understanding formal definitions before the middle-school years. Young children typically include in their definitions information that is incidental, idiosyncratic, and highly personal (Hagtvet, 1986; Litowitz, 1977; Snow, 1990; Watson, 1985), though they can sometimes be induced to improve their definitions by adding a superordinate if pushed (Watson & Olson, 1987). Older children who demonstrate with some words that they know what form a definition should take fail to adhere to the constraints that only "definitional" information be given for other words (Snow, 1990; Snow, Cancino, Gonzalez, & Shriberg, 1989). Even adults often fail fully to respect the constraints on the definitional genre for abstract nouns, and when giving definitions for verbs and adjectives (Markowitz & Franz, in press). Understanding formal definitions is also quite difficult for children as old as ten or twelve (Miller & Gildea, 1985), perhaps because the conventions that govern the form are opaque to children who have not yet developed a reliable ability to analyze their own word and concept knowledge. The suggestion that skill at giving formal definitions relates to the ability to analyze one's own knowledge about a word's meaning is supported by the finding that definitional skill relates in rural populations to number of years of schooling (Tapia-Uribe, 1988) and to school achievement, particularly in literacy (Snow, Cancino, Gonzalez, & Shriberg, 1989). Literacy tasks, like some oral-language tasks, require analysis of knowledge; this is particularly true for those literacy tasks in which new information must 91
Catherine E. Snow et al. be comprehended and/or remembered by virtue of being related to old information. Thus, it makes good sense that performance on such tasks relates to performance on the formal-definitions task. In addition to analysis of knowledge about word meanings, performing well on formal definitions requires analysis of the form itself, and acquisition of the linguistic structures required to replicate it. Formal definitions are, despite their saliency in classrooms, a rather infrequent form, and one which may require the availability of relatively rare vocabulary items for identifying the superordinate class. Accordingly, one might expect that children perform worse in giving definitions in their second language, in which they have had less opportunity for exposure to the relevant form and vocabulary. Alternatively, however, if the second language is also the curricular language, and thus the language in which definitions have mostly been heard, one might expect better performance. Malakoff (1988) and Johnson (this volume) both found that performance on school-like tasks was better in the school language even for learners whose overall proficiency in that language was limited. Finally, one might expect that performance in giving formal definitions would relate to bilingualism. Considerable evidence suggests that bilingual children have higher levels of metalinguistic skill than monolingual children. Bilingual children have had an opportunity to develop control of processing to a greater extent than monolingual children (Bialystok, 1986), particularly children who have acquired the second language for use in academic circumstances. One might expect, then, that performance on a task like giving formal definitions would be better for children who have had the opportunity to achieve higher degrees of bilingualism. Alternatively, one might expect that children who are good at the formal-definitions task will be more skilled at foreign-language learning, a task which is heavily dependent on metalinguistic skills. Data relevant to all these issues will be presented in this chapter. The study Setting Data were collected from children attending the United Nations International School (UNIS), an independent school in Manhattan that serves the U.N. and international community of the New York City area, as well as American children whose parents are interested in a high-quality, culturally diverse educational setting. English is the curricular language of UNIS, and French is taught as a foreign language to all the children in the elementary grades who are fully integrated into the English-language curriculum. Excellent English as a Second Language (E.S.L.) services are 92
Giving formal definitions available to the approximately 50 per cent of the children at UNIS who are not native speakers of English; after exiting from E.S.L., children spend approximately one year in the "transition" program, during which they get special help from the classroom teacher during the time their classmates attend foreign-language classes.
Subjects One hundred and fifty second through fifth graders participated in the larger study of which the definitions task was one part. Of these, 137 provided usable data on the definitions task in English and seventy-one provided usable definitions in French. The children were distributed approximately equally over second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. They represented the full range of children attending UNIS, in terms of their family backgrounds (children from monolingual English-speaking families, children born in the U.S. A. into families where one or more other languages are usually spoken, children who had started school abroad and received E.S.L. training after transferring to UNIS), though children whose English was still very poor could not complete the test battery. An attempt was made to test all the children in French as well as in English, but this was only possible for sixty-four of them; the others had either started French classes much more recently, or were simply poorer students and thus had not learned enough French to be able to perform this task. Thirty-two of the sixty-four subjects had English as a major or exclusive home language and were learning French as a second language in the classroom. Twelve had French as their home language, were fully integrated in the English curriculum, and thus were enrolled in French as a second language. The remaining twenty children used a language other than English or French at home, attended school in English, and were learning French as a curricular subject. Seven children were tested in French but not English.
Procedure The definitions test was administered as part of a longer test battery. The adult experimenter and the child went to a quiet, private corner within the school for the individual test session. The instructions for the definitions task were simply "Tell me what xxx is." The words used were the first ten nouns from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-R). These words were selected because we wished to use items for which all the children would be likely to know the meaning. Translation equivalents were used in French, with occasional substitutions when the translation was ambiguous. 93
Catherine E. Snow et al. Coding The coding procedure is described here in full for the reader's ease, though basic results from some of the scores have been reported elsewhere (Snow, 1990). The coding was designed to reflect the degree to which children approached the norm of adult-like, Aristotelian definitions, with a superordinate, a restrictive complement, and the inclusion of criterial information about the word's meaning. In outline, coding proceeded as follows: the transcribed definition was first sorted into one of two broad classes. It was called a formal definition if it included anywhere in the stretch of talk a copular construction and some superordinate predicated of the definiendum. Definitions with vague superordinates {something, a thing) and quasisuperordinates {a kind of) were scored as formal. Each child received a score indicating the percent of words defined that were given a formal definition (%F.D.). Formal definitions were then scored on a variety of categories: 1.
2.
3.
4.
Syntax: the degree to which the definition given approached the ideal definitional syntax "x is a y [restrictive complement]" was scored on a four-point scale, in which no complement was scored as 1 and a full relative clause was scored as 4. Superordinate: the quality of the superordinate was rated on a four-point scale, with thing and a kind of scored as 1, something or someone scored as 2, something or someone with added specific qualifications was scored as 3, and the adult-like superordinate (e.g., animal, vehicle, utensil) was scored as 4. Complement: the semantic content of the complement was rated on a four-point scale with no complement scored 0, an incorrect or misleading complement scored 1, a correct but insufficiently limiting complement scored 2, and a properly restrictive complement scored 3. Definitional features: the number of correct definitional features mentioned was counted. Definitional features were decided on in advance for each word, based on elicited adult and dictionary definitions of the words.
A summed score based on the above four categories was calculated per word; this score is referred to as the formal definitional quality (F.D.Q.)If non-definitional but correct information about the meaning of a word was provided in addition to a formal definition (e.g., examples of its use, descriptions, comparisons) instances were scored under the category formal definitional supplement (F.D.S.). F.D.Q. and F.D.S. scores were averaged over the number of words which received formal definitions to calculate the child's score. If a definition did not qualify as formal, it was then scored to reflect how much information was provided about the definiendum. Points were given for correct information about definitional features, descriptive features, functions, examples, etc. These points were summed per word 94
Giving formal definitions to provide a score of informal definitional quality (I.D.Q.). The I.D.Q. word scores were averaged over the number of words which received informal definitions to calculate the child's score. Thus, the I.D.Q. score was independent of the F.D.Q. and F.D.S. scores, since it was based on a different set of words. The entire definition, whether formal or informal, was rated on a fourpoint scale for communicative adequacy (C.A.). If it was possible to know what word was being defined just from the definition, a score of 4 was assigned; if one would probably select the correct word, but there remained some ambiguity about exact identity, a score of 3; etc. The C.A. score was averaged over all the words for which definitions were given. Finally, the incidence of use of conversational features (C.F.) in either formal or informal definitions was counted. Conversational features included all gestures or verbal behaviors that exploited the conversational interactive context, for example, asking direct questions of the adult, requesting help with words, using gestures, soliciting acknowledgement, language switches, and linguistic fillers. Two coders rated all the English definitions from the children, and served as trainers for the single French-definitions coder. All coders had to reach perfect agreement on five definitions protocols before coding independently.
Results
Nature of development Development of skill at giving formal definitions has two components: recognizing that formal definitions are called for, and being able to give formal definitions of adequate precision and conventionality. Development in both these domains occurred between second and fifth grade in the UNIS sample (Snow, 1990, presents details of data on development of definitional form). Percent of English definitions that were formal increased from 49 percent at second grade to 79 percent at fifth (Snow, 1990). To demonstrate the kind of development in quality that occurred, we present here definitions that were scored at approximately the average score achieved by second, third, fourth, and fifth graders giving formal definitions (scores achieved are in parentheses). A donkey is . . . a baby horse, I think, and you can ride on it, but it's not as big as a horse (6.5). A donkey's something you can ride on, and it sounds like this, hee-a, hee-a(7.5). Donkey? Well, it's a sort of horse, a very small horse, which . . . is very 95
Catherine E. Snow et al. lazy, and ... if not really ... pulled ... can just sit there and ... not do anything (8). An animal ... that looks like a horse; it's the same family as the horse, and it's ... hard to ... uh ... move around (9). To extend the contrast let us consider the lowest scoring and the highest scoring formal definitions of donkey offered by any of the children: It's a dumb animal (4). A donkey is an animal that most people use to wor ... to make them work for them, or ... to ... use to ride (11.5). These definitions do not differ very greatly in semantic content. Though the superordinates vary from something to sort of horse to animal, the lowest-scoring definition here actually included animal, the most sophisticated superordinate used by anyone in the sample for donkey. The notion that donkeys are used as beasts of burden is at least hinted at in all but the poorest definition, and indications of stubbornness are also quite general. These definitions are not distinguished from one another by semantic content as much as by form. The examples given here, which are typical of the range of formal definitions offered by children in this study, suggest that the most sophisticated definitions differ from the less sophisticated in the degree to which the information given is organized into a single, well-planned structure. It was characteristic of the best definitions, and of those given by older children, that they contained many false starts, hesitations, and restructurings. The poorer definitions, and those given by younger children, tended, on the other hand, to be much more fluent. The dysfluencies in the definitions given here clearly reflect the complexities of syntacticizing into a single sentence information which is simple enough to convey in several separate sentences: donkeys are animals, people cause donkeys to perform work, people ride donkeys, donkeys do not work willingly, donkeys resemble and are related to horses. The dysfluencies associated with going beyond a simple listing of donkey attributes to a fully developed definition suggest that success at giving formal definitions shares with other distanced, decontextualized language tasks the need for selfmonitoring and careful planning. Children exhibit this on-line planning and their struggles with the constraints of the form through their hesitations and reformulations. While the formal definitions showed the development exemplified above, the quality of informal definitions (I.D.Q.) showed no age-related changes (Snow, 1990). Since the scores on the informal definitions reflect the amount of information they contain, this suggests that development in giving definitions is not controlled primarily by the fact that children know more about the word's meaning or about the target concept. Rather, they know better 96
Giving formal definitions Table 5.1 Means of English and French communicative adequacy (C. A.) and conversational features (C.F.) scores Grade CA English*
French** CF English* French**
2
3
4
5
F
P
0.99 1.78 0.06 0.25
1.33 1.35 0.05 0.18
1.58 1.22 0.03 0.96
1.64 1.59 0.08 0.83
11.99 1.33 0.66 2.12
0.001 n.s. n.s. n.s.
Notes: *df= 3/129; **df= 3/62.
what information is relevant to the task, and they know better how to package that information into a linguistic structure. If the growth in percent and quality of formal definitions reflects a growing ability to assess the adequacy of one's own speech, and to adjust to the needs of the listener, then we would expect that the communicativeadequacy scores would increase with age as well. As can be seen from table 5.1, C A . scores in English do show a significant increase with grade, though even the fifth graders' scores are not yet close to the highest possible rating of 4. On the other hand, there are no grade-related changes in conversational features (gestures, linguistic fillers, etc.), the incidence of which remains quite low across the entire age range observed (see table 5.1). The low level of conversational features suggests that even the youngest children understood that this task was meant as a formal, non-conversational task. Nonetheless, as we shall see below, the presence of conversational features related to other aspects of the children's performance on this and other tasks. Home versus school sources of definitional skill Since definitions are a school task, it makes sense that skill in giving definitions should relate to one's school experience more strongly than to one's home experience. Indeed, this is precisely what previous analyses have revealed (Snow, 1990). A multiple regression analysis showed that exposure to English at school explained considerably more of the variance on English formal definition scores than did exposure to English at home. Furthermore, exposure to French at home explained none of the variance on formal definition scores in French (Snow, 1990). These results recall the findings of Malakoff (1988) and Johnson (this volume), who also show that school exposure to a language enables children to perform well on school-like tasks in that language, even for children whose overall proficiency in the language is relatively low. One wonders, then, whether it is ever possible to achieve high levels 97
Catherine E. Snow et al. of performance on a task like definitions in a language where one has had relatively little exposure to them. Many notions about second-language acquisition suggest this should not be difficult - that knowledge from an earlier learned language about the need for analysis of content and of form can be transferred quite easily to a second language (Cummins et al., 1984; Mace-Matluck, 1979; Snow, 1987). The hypothesis that such knowledge can be easily transferred from a stronger to a weaker language is not supported by the relatively low and sometimes negative correlations obtained between definitions scores in English and French for this sample (Snow, 1990), though very high cross-language correlations were obtained for a sample of good bilinguals who had received schooling in both French and English (Davidson, Kline, & Snow, 1986) and considerably higher correlations have been found in Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilinguals attending school in both Spanish and English (Velasco & Snow, in preparation). These results exemplify the impact of language of instruction on the development of decontextualized language skills. A more careful breakdown of the seventy-one subjects who provided definitions in French in this study confirmed the earlier finding that exposure to French in the home is not necessarily related to higher scores on French definitions. Furthermore, of the forty-nine children who had minimal or no home exposure to French, a small group (n = 9) were identified by their French teachers as excellent school learners of French. These children achieved very high French definitions scores, almost equivalent to their own scores in English (see table 5.2). For this subgroup, then, the transfer from the stronger to the weaker language seems to have been successful. These findings suggest that transfer of the analysis skills that underlie giving good definitions may simply not be possible before a certain, evidently fairly high, level of L2 proficiency is achieved. Furthermore, the children who are relatively quite advanced in the analysis skills that are needed to give good definitions may be those children who are best able to cope with the academic demands of foreign-language study (a notoriously difficult task for elementary-school children). Of particular interest, six of the nine children identified as excellent school learners of French used a language other than French or English at home (e.g., Hungarian, Arabic, Portuguese, German); thus French was at least the third language they were learning. This suggests that their previous successful experience in learning a second language (English) may have been beneficial to them in their study of yet another language (French), perhaps by providing them with additional sources of support for the development of metalinguistic abilities. College students' success in foreign language study has been shown to relate to their level of metalinguistic skill in their first language (Webster, 1986). The French definitions scores of the "good school learners" may reflect the same relationship. 98
Giving formal definitions Table 5.2 Scores in English and French for children with home vs school exposure to French School
Home good learner
average learner
n = 16* n = U*
/i = 7
n = 99
AI = 9
H = 44
72% 69% 6.97 7.83 1.04 0.94 1.92 2.49 0.14 0.06 1.27 1.55
81% 70% 8.85 7.45 0.88 0.49 1.57 1.50 0.00 0.63 1.91 1.55
69% 71%
Measure Eng.: Fr.: % F.D. Eng. Fr. F.D.Q. Eng. Fr. F.D.S. Eng. Fr. I.D.Q. Eng. Fr. C.F. Eng. Fr. C.A. Eng. Fr.
7.86 5.52 1.06 0.60 2.47 1.18 0.04 1.05 1.42 1.35
P
n.s. n.s. n.s. 0.006 n.s. n.s. n.s. 0.02 0.0004 0.001 0.05 n.s.
Note: *n's for English and French means differ because a few of the children could not perform the task in English, and many could not perform it in French.
Bilingualism and definitional skill If giving definitions is a task which relates to metalinguistic skill in general, then we might expect it would also relate to degree of bilingualism, since there is ample evidence that bilingual children show precocious metalinguistic skills (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Bialystok, 1986; Cummins, 1978; Galambos & Hakuta, 1988; Ianco-Worrall, 1972; Leopold, 1939-1949; Slobin, 1978). We assessed this possibility by dividing the children into three categories: those who were minimally bilingual, having had exposure to a second language only through foreign-language classes; those who had had some exposure to and need for the use of a second language at home or in other schools, but who were not fully bilingual; those who were fully bilingual, that is, used some language in addition to English regularly and well. The fully bilingual group scored slightly below the other two groups on English F.D.Q., but also lowest in communicative adequacy, on which the partially bilingual group scored highest (see table 5.3). These differences were only marginally significant (p = 0.09 and 0.06 respectively). The minimally bilingual group used significantly more conversational 99
Catherine E. Snow et al. Table 5.3
Effects of status as a bilingual on scores in English and French
Measure Eng.: Fr.: % F.D. Eng.
Fr. F.D.Q. Eng.
Fr. F.D.S. Eng.
Fr. I.D.Q. Eng.
Fr. C.F. Eng.
Fr. C.A. Eng.
Fr.
Minimally bilingual
Partially bilingual
Fully bilingual
n = 49* n = 20*
n = 59 n = 34
Al = 1 6
71% 66%
69% 71%
68% 71%
7.99 5.42 1.04 0.49 2.32 1.23 0.04 1.40 1.38 1.44
7.82 6.43 0.99 0.77 2.36 1.67 0.04 0.54 1.52 1.48
6.98 6.75 1.03 0.68 1.80 1.78 0.10 0.48 1.23 1.43
P
* = 29 n.s. n.s. 0.09 n.s. n.s. n.s. n.s. n.s. n.s. 0.0001 0.06 n.s.
Note: * n's differ somewhat because many children tested in English could not be tested in French, and a few tested in French were not tested in English.
features in French (mean of 1.40, compared to 0.54 and 0.48 for the partially and fully bilingual groups; F(2,67) = 10.77,p<0.001); the fact that conversational features were more frequent in French but not in English suggests the effect is due to this group's lower proficiency in French rather than any direct effect of bilingualism. Thus, we have no strong support in these data for any proposed positive (or negative) consequence of bilingualism per se. It should be pointed out, though, that being bilingual is to some extent compounded in this sample (as it would be in almost any sample drawn in the U.S.) with being a non-native speaker of English. We have already noted above that English performance on formal definitions relates to school exposure to English - of which the native English speakers had more. To explore further the possibly subtle effects of multilingualism on performance in the definitions task, we also looked at the number of languages the children spoke, and at the amount of exposure to the most dominant language other than English or French. Neither of these classifications related in any significant way to scores on the definitions task.
Relations across measures One way of viewing language skill is to think of it as a global, undifferentiated capacity; such a view would predict that children who do well at 100
Giving formal definitions Table 5.4 scores
Within-language correlations for English and French definitions
% F.D. Eng. Fr. F.D.Q. Eng. Fr. F.D.S. Eng. Fr. I.D.Q. Eng. Fr. C.F. Eng. Fr. C.A. Eng. Fr.
% F.D.
F.D.Q.
0.55*** 0.32** 0.16* -0.11 -0.31*** -0.38*** -0.16* 0.10 0.40*** 0.03
0.15* 0.45*** -0.04 0.36** -0.10 -0.32** 0.56*** 0.33**
F.D.S.
I.D.Q.
0.35*** 0.49*** 0.14* 0.29*** -0.23* -0.23* 0.26** 0.06 0.18 0.06
C.F.
C.A.
0.03 0.07
Notes: *O.OOKp <0.05;**0.0009
Catherine E. Snow et al. Table 5.5 Between-language correlations for English and French definitions scores English % F.D. F.D.Q. F.D.S. I.D.Q. C.F. C.A.
French % F.D.
F.D.Q.
0.27* 0.13 -0.15 -0.07 -0.01 0.09
0.10 -0.03 -0.19 -0.05 0.03 0.11
F.D.S.
I.D.Q.
-0.01 -0.09 0.20* 0.16 0.08 -0.10
-0.02 -0.19 -0.07 -0.27* 0.05 -0.10
C.F.
C.A.
0.05 -0.08 0.04 0.07 0.12 0.40*** 0.06 0.28* -0.07 -0.03 0.02 0.28*
Notes: *0.001
Relations across languages The correlations between scores in French and English definitions (table 5.5) were not very high, a result we attribute to the relatively low average level of proficiency in French of children in this sample. As a result, individual differences in French proficiency swamped the results, making cross language relationships difficult to identify. However, a more qualitative analysis of individual students' responses in French and English might reveal whether they were using the same strategies to define specific words and their translation equivalents. We present here data from a few individual children, who represent something of the range available in the entire sample. Christophe was a native German-speaker who was in the fifth grade at UNIS. He had been taking French for three years, and was an average French student, though his performance in English made clear his abilities to learn a second language. Christophe provided the following definition in English for bicycle. Uh-it's . . . something with two wheels, and you can steer the front wheel, and there're many kinds, there're racing bikes . . . and you can travel from one place to another, you have to pedal.
In French, he was hindered by lack of relevant vocabulary, but nonetheless achieved an equivalent level of sophistication in terms of superordinate selected and the crucial bits of information (two wheels and to ride): C'est quelque chose pour monter et umm ... c'est quelque chose avec deux . . . umm, roues? et il y a un de ... tu fais ride. A harder word, alphabet, was treated almost identically in both languages: 102
Giving formal definitions It's all the letters in the [giggle] all the letters ... that... in the language. C'est des lettres . . . c'est toutes les lettres. Similarly, the attempts at thief are distinguished only by the presence of a bit more detail in English: It's a person [giggle] that comes in your house mostly through the window and steals things. C'est une personne qui entre dans la maison et vole quelque chose. The extra difficulties introduced by being asked to define an adjective, favorite, become equally evident in Christophers stronger language, English, and in French: Favorite is when you have a favorite person or someone you like the best or something you like the best. Favori? Ton livre favori? Tu aimes beaucoup. In English, Christophe is reduced for favorite to the more immature "x is when you . . . " form, and in French he seems to associate the word favori primarily with one referent - favorite books. These responses clearly remain much more tied to frequently encountered uses of the term, not influenced by analysis of those uses to establish a core meaning. Beatrice, a native Portuguese speaker in fifth grade at UNIS, was one of the group of excellent school learners of French. Like Christophe, she tended to use similar strategies in giving definitions across the two languages. A knife is something that you cut with ... if you pi- if small children play with a knife, they might cut their finger. Un couteau c'est quelque chose qui coupe, f a peut couper de la viande, le poulet - quelque chose comme 9a. Interestingly, she gave a higher proportion of informal than formal definitions even in English (her stronger second language), though with hesitations and dysfluencies characteristic of self-monitoring. Despite the fact that she gave a more sophisticated definition for favorite in French than in English, her definitions showed the expected relationship - more detail and more self-monitoring in English: Favorite means something ... like, I-I have - my favorite animal is a dog, it's a-one you like the best. Favori c'est une chose que tu aimes beaucoup, c'est mon favori animal. Beatrice had achieved a remarkably high level of fluency in French, but still in general showed more attention to the form of her speech in English, as one would expect. Nicole was a third grader who spoke French at home with her parents. As one would expect, then, the amount of detail in her French definitions 103
Catherine E. Snow et al. was greater than in her English definitions, but the crucial, definitional information tended to be identical in both. Her definitional style was in general rather terse: Knife is something that you cut with. Cest quelque chose que tu coupes avec, avec . . . comme tu coupes decoupes du viande, et tout 9a. Umbrella's what when it's rains you put over your head. Cest quand il pleut tu . . . il faut que tu le prends. A nail is something that you could screw in the wall and put a painting on, put a picture on it, Cest quelque chose quand tu vas . . . euh . . . veux mettre quelque chose sur une mur, tu vas mettre ce dessus, et apres tu vas . . . euh . . . mets ce que tu veux mettre sur le mur.
These comparisons show that, although the children in both the tested languages tended to reveal a similar degree of analysis of their own knowledge, their actual performance is greatly affected by ease of retrieval and processing in the target language. Although the children who speak French at home might have an advantage retrieving certain kinds of words and structures in French, nonetheless the forms specifically required for definitions - superordinates, generic constructions - seem not to be more easily accessible to them in French than in English. As a result, their performance in French was superior only for informal definitions, not for the quality of formal definitions.
Conclusions
The data we have reported here and elsewhere (Davidson, Kline, & Snow, 1986; Snow, 1990; Snow, Cancino, Gonzalez, & Shriberg, 1989) about the development of definitions suggest the range of accomplishments represented by the good formal definition. To provide a formal definition, children must first analyze the task situation in which they find themselves, decide that a formal definition is required, and recall the form peculiar to this particular genre; then they must reflect on the meaning of a target word, analyze what they know about that word in order to decide what is central to its meaning
