Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 225

Many studies have shown that a bilingual's two languages constantly interact with one another. It appears that even a purely unilingual communicative setting does not prevent the contextually inappropriate language from also being active and influencing the way in which the target language is processed. This holds for both language comprehension (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003) and language production (e.g., Starreveld, De Groot, Rossmark, & Van Hell, 2014), even when a bilingual's two languages do not share any orthographic or phonological relationship (e.g., English and Chinese; Wen, Filik, & Van Heuven, 2018), and when one language is spoken but the other is a sign language (Morford, Kroll, Piñar, & Wilkinson, 2014). The inevitable consequence of the inherently interactive nature of the bilingual language system is that the linguistic expressions of bilinguals differ from the analogous expressions of monolingual speakers. In other words, bilinguals do not equal two monolinguals in one person, and the linguistic expressions of monolinguals should not be considered the norm against which the language of bilinguals is evaluated. Contrary to such a “fractional” view of bilingualism, a “holistic” (Grosjean, 1989) or “multicompetence” (Cook & Li Wei, 2016) view of bilingualism acknowledges the inherently interactive nature of the bilingual language system. This more realistic view acknowledges that the frequent use of two languages produces a specific linguistic competence, one that differs from the competence of monolingual speaker–listeners but that is by no means inferior to it.

Most studies on language interaction (also called “crosslinguistic influence” or “transfer”) in bilinguals have looked at the influence of the native, first language (L1) on using the second (L2), ignoring the possibility that L2 may also influence L1. Laufer (2003) suggests one reason is that many researchers in applied linguistics have been especially interested in L2 learning, and particularly in its earliest stages. Crosslinguistic influences during these early stages of learning are almost entirely from the stronger L1 to the still weak L2 rather than from L2 to L1. A second reason she suggests is that much work on L2 learning has been motivated by the question of how members of immigrant communities can come to master the dominant language of the host community, the immigrants' L2, as rapidly as possible. Consequently, research primarily focused on how L2 was acquired rather than on what happened to L1 in the process. Whatever the reasons for the relative lack of studies examining an influence of L2 on L1, the available evidence indicates that such influence exists in all linguistic domains: phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, conceptual representation, and pragmatics (Pavlenko, 2000).

Language interaction in bilinguals is manifest in multiple phenomena. Among them are accented speech and accented comprehension, that is, the production of particular linguistic elements that differ from the way monolingual speakers would produce them, and differences in language comprehension processes as compared with monolinguals listening to or reading analogous language input. The word “accent” is used in a broad sense here, referring to differences in both language production and language comprehension in bilinguals as compared with monolinguals, and to differences in all linguistic subdomains, not just phonology.

One possible source of accents is parallel activation of representations of linguistic elements in bilinguals' two language subsystems, even when they have selected one of their languages (the “target” language) for current use. Because the language system of monolinguals only stores linguistic units belonging to a single language, such parallel activation does not occur when monolinguals process language. According to this view, the representation units themselves do not need to differ between monolinguals and bilinguals. For instance, the representation of the English phoneme /t/ and the stored meaning for English cat in an English–French bilingual are identical to the representation of English /t/ and the stored meaning of English cat in a monolingual English speaker. The second possible source of bilingual speech accents is that bilinguals may have developed memory representations of specific linguistic units that differ from the representations of the corresponding units in monolingual memory. For instance, bilinguals may have developed representations that merge a pair of corresponding representations in monolingual speakers of their two languages. The former source of accents may be regarded a difference in processing or “performance”; the latter a difference in knowledge or “competence.”