Synopsis
Bilingualism (multilingualism) is a common human characteristic. Understanding the bilingual individual from the perspective of the cognitive neurosciences requires an appreciation of the conditions that accompany the use of multiple languages in society: its relationship to social status, compartmentalization of functions of languages, literacy, immigrant generation, and other historical circumstances. Bilingual individuals also vary in significant ways with respect to age of acquisition, language proficiency attained, participation in a bilingual speech community, and the particular languages involved. Current knowledge of psycholinguistic processes and brain organization that address differential representation of bilingualism is summarized.
Introduction
Bilingualism (multilingualism) refers to the co-existence of more than one
language system within an individual, as contrasted to monolingualism. The question of how the two languages interact at the cognitive and behavioral levels has been of longstanding interest to psycholinguists as well as to neurologists, clinicians and educators. There has been great anticipation that developments in cognitive neuroscience could shed further light on important fundamental questions in the understanding of bilingualism.
Bilingualism as an individual condition is nested within a distribution of broader societal circumstances that cause language contact. There are many different manifestations of this variability. Bilingualism may be the result of growing up in a bilingual community, such as a bilingual neighborhood of an immigrant community in New York. But that is different from bilingualism that results from growing up in an officially bilingual country such as Canada, where its two official languages are separated by geographical regions. Bilingualism that is accompanied by literacy in both languages is different from bilingualism in which schooling is available in one language (the one
that also carries social prestige) but not the other. While the interest of the cognitive neuroscientist in bilingualism may be in understanding the neural bases of the distribution of the two linguistic systems in the bilingual, the reality is that research subjects and clinical patients invariably come from a sampling from the social distribution. It is thus necessary to begin an understanding of bilingualism from its social bases.
Reprinted from the 2008 Encyclopedia of Neuroscience by Kenji Hakuta of Stanford University
Bilingualism. In L. Squire (ed.) New Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Elsevier.
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