The effects of multilingualism

The possible gains/costs of multilingualism in relation to other cognitive faculties or processes have been a matter of speculation and study for many years. The strength of positive versus negative perceptions of the relationship has shifted over time, and this shift has been attributable as much to philosophical and political factors as to scientific findings.

Philosophically, the notion that multilingualism has positive effects on cognitive development was traditionally related to the belief that foreign language study (especially Greek and Latin) is good for “training the mind”; there is still an assumption in many parts of the world that multilingualism is an essential characteristic of “educated” and “cultured” members of society.

The opposite notion, that multilingualism has a negative impact on general intelligence, perhaps reached its zenith in US-based research on immigrants during the 1930s, motivated by increasingly xenophobic isolationist political sentiments at that time, and based on the low scores of immigrants who spoke languages other than English natively on the standardized tests of intelligence which then were coming into widespread use. (The point was not made until some years later that these tests were being administered in a language which the subjects did not speak fluently or understand well, and that the individuals were not being tested in their native languages.)

 Research since the 1960s has largely supported claims that multilingualism has positive effects on intellectual functions, based on “measures of conceptual development, creativity, metalinguistic awareness, semantic development, and analytic skills” (Diaz 1985 :18). The following list is a summary of positive findings (Diaz and Klingler 1991 :184):

• Bilingual children show consistent advantages in tasks of both verbal and nonverbal abilities.

 • Bilingual children show advanced metalinguistic abilities, especially manifested in their control of language processing.

• Cognitive and metalinguistic advantages appear in bilingual situations that involve systematic uses of the two languages, such as simultaneous acquisition settings or bilingual education.

 • The cognitive effects of bilingualism appear relatively early in the process of becoming bilingual and do not require high levels of bilingual proficiency nor the achievement of balanced bilingualism.

 • Bilingual children have advantages in the use of language for verbal mediation, as shown by their higher frequency of private-speech utterances and their larger number of private-speech functions.

Recent attention has focused most on the positive effects that bilingual ism appears to have on memory. This holds true both for children and for aging adults (e.g. Kormi-Nouri, Moniri, and Nilsson 2003; Bialystok, Craik, Klein & Viswanathan 2004).

Relatively recent negative claims regarding multilingualism have primarily addressed capacity limitations for language acquisition and maintenance, with evidence that simultaneous bilingualism in childhood may result in a narrower range of lexical development in either language, and that intensive and continued use of L2 may reduce accessibility of L1. Common and stable multilingualism among populations in many parts of the world, however, suggests that whatever limitations there may be are not biological in nature. Some of the social factors influencing interaction between multilingualism and other aspects of cognitive development and academic performance are discussed in Chapter 5.

Most interesting here is that, whether evidence is positive or negative (and it is generally positive), there are differences in the way multilinguals perform cognitive tasks. A person who knows more than one language can perceive and experience the world through more than one lens: “Both negative and positive effects are signs that L2 users think differently from monolinguals . . . Multicompetence is a different state of mind” (Cook 1992 :565). Accounting for the differences remains one of the most intriguing challenges for psychological approaches to SLA.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Primary and compound metaphors

Primary Metaphor Theory

Hiding and highlighting

The conceptual nature of metaphor

Invariance

Metaphors and image schemas

Metaphor systems

Metaphorical entailments

Motivation for target and source

The unidirectionality of metaphor

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

What is metaphor?