Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 230

Until well beyond the middle of the 20th century the view prevailed that bilingualism is detrimental for intelligence and cognitive functioning in general. A study by Peal and Lambert (1962) marked a change from this view to the opinion that, under specific conditions, bilingualism is in fact beneficial for intelligence and cognition, including some aspects of linguistic competence. In that study 10‐year‐old French–English bilingual and French monolingual children from middle‐class French schools in Canada's Montreal region were administered a number of tests that measured their verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Whereas earlier studies had shown a disadvantage for bilingual children as compared with monolingual peers, the bilingual children in this study performed significantly better than the monolingual children on most tests, both the ones that measured verbal intelligence and those measuring nonverbal intelligence. The bilingual advantage was, for instance, manifest in tasks that assessed concept formation ability and mental flexibility, and the bilingual children showed a more diversified set of mental abilities than the monolingual children.

To account for the discrepant results, Lambert (1977) highlighted one potentially crucial feature of the Peal and Lambert (1962) study, namely the fact that in the Montreal region both French and English are socially highly respected languages. Therefore, the acquisition of English by children with French as their home language does not involve the risk of French getting corrupted as a consequence of a social pressure not to use it. This form of bilingualism, where an L2 is added onto an L1 that does not suffer a cost, has been coined “additive bilingualism,” and it is this form of bilingualism that is advantageous for cognition. The counterpart of additive bilingualism is “subtractive bilingualism.” In this form of bilingualism, for one reason or other (e.g., national and educational policies), the use of L1 is discouraged, with the effect that it is gradually replaced by L2. This form of bilingualism is detrimental for cognitive functioning. Plausibly, the earlier studies had accidentally tested bilinguals of the subtractive type. A further possible cause of the deviant results is that many of the earlier studies lacked experimental rigor, not properly matching the bilingual participants and their monolingual controls on relevant variables such as age, socioeconomic status, and amount of education (see Hakuta & Diaz, 1985, for a review). In all these respects, Peal and Lambert's study compared favorably with the earlier ones. Recent research confirms this analysis (e.g., Nicolay & Poncelet, 2015).