Language Processing In Bilingual Children

A collection of papers that explore bilingual children coping with two language systems.

This collection of 33 papers represents the most current thinking and research on the study of cognitive processing in bilingual individuals. The contributors include well-known figures in the field and promising new scholars, representing four continents and work in dozens of languages. Instead of the social, political, or educational implications of bilingualism, the focus is on how bilingual people (mostly adults) think and process language.

This book focuses exclusively on child bilinguals or children exposed to a second language in various learning contexts. Through the presentation of research on how children learn the sound systems or lexicon in two languages and via different routes, the book aims to paint a comprehensive picture of child bilingualism and second language learning. In addition, the book features contributions focused on theoretical overviews and methodological approaches. Researchers from diverse disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and speech-language pathology contributed to the book that thus represents an effort to integrate multiple views and perspectives. The book is useful for researchers, clinicians, and educators who work with children acquiring or learning a second language in different settings. It should also be of interest to university students studying bilingualism and/or second language acquisition or parents raising bilingual children.

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage in this volume is a testament to the many different aspects of bilingualism that continue to generate phenomenal interest in the scholarly community. The bilingual experience is captured through a multifaceted prism that includes aspects of language and literacy development in child bilinguals with and without developmental language disorders, language processing and mental representations in adult bilinguals across the lifespan, and the cognitive and neurological basis of bilingualism. Different theoretical approaches – from generative UG-based models to constructivist usage-based models – are brought to bear on the nature of bilingual linguistic knowledge. The end result is a compendium of the state-of-the-art of a field that is in constant evolution and that is on an upward trajectory of discovery.

A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Peña and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children’s language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.

For decades, bilingualism has resisted definition. If bilingualism is defined as habitual, fluent, correct and accent-free use of two languages, few individuals would qualify as bilinguals. A more viable approach may be to concede that ‘bilingual’ can be seen instead as a range of points on a continuum that allows for differences. The psychological study of bilingualism encompasses a wide range of phenomena including the organization and representation of the grammar, the perception and production of language mixing, cerebral lateralization of language functions, and patterns of recovery of aphasic patients. This book collects together an international array of researchers in experimental psychology, linguistics and neuropsychology, who bring their expertise to bear on the critical issues that are raised by the bilingual phenomena.

During the last years a significant number of papers, books, and monographs devoted to speech and language impairments in bilingual children have been published. Different aspects and questions have been approached and today we have a relatively good understanding of the specific characteristics of the speech and language difficulties potentially observed in bilingual and multilingual children. This interest has been significantly resulted from the potential developmental and educational consequences of bilingualism. Our understanding of the communication disorders in adult populations is notoriously more limited, even though over 50% of the adult population can speak at least another language in addition to his/her native language. That simply means that over 50% of the communication disorders observed in adults are bilingual speech and language disorders: bilingual aphasias, bilingual dementias, bilingual stuttering, etc. This book was written with the specific purpose of filling this gap. The major purpose of this book has been to integrate the state of the art on the different aspects of the communication disorders observed in adult bilinguals. The book is organised in such a way that an integrated perspective of bilingualism is presented: from the normal conditions to the pathology; from the clinical descriptions to the rehabilitation issues; from the biological factors to the cultural variables.