Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 238

There is increasing evidence of the importance of language mode in bilingual communication. In language production, observational and experimental studies have shown its impact. Poplack 1981 showed that a member of El Barrio—a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York—produced about four times more code switches in informal situations, compared to formal situations. Treffers‐Daller 1998 placed a Turkish–German bilingual in three different situations and showed changes in the base language used as well as differences in the amount of code switching that took place. In a series of experimental studies, Grosjean and his colleagues (reported in Grosjean, 2008) manipulated the language mode participants were in using a “telephone chain” task, and studied the impact this had on language production. The number of guest‐language elements (code switches, borrowings) increased significantly as the participants moved from a monolingual to a bilingual mode, whereas the number of base‐language syllables decreased, as did the number of hesitations.

In perception, Elman, Diehl, and Buchwald 1977 carried out a categorical‐perception study with bilinguals in which they controlled for the base language and “pushed” bilin‐guals toward the monolingual end of the language‐mode continuum (they used naturally produced stimuli, filler words in the base language, as well as carrier sentences in either English or Spanish). They found a boundary shift, with ambiguous stimuli perceived significantly more as English or as Spanish depending on the language condition listeners were in. In this study, unlike in an earlier study by Caramazza, Yeni‐Komshian, Zurif, and Carbone 1973, there was constant language‐specific information which activated one language much more than the other and hence kept the bilinguals toward the monolingual end of the continuum.

In language acquisition, there is increasing evidence of the importance of language mode. For example, Lanza 1992 studied a 2‐year‐old Norwegian–English bilingual child, Siri, interacting with her American mother who feigned the role of a monolingual and did not mix languages, and with her Norwegian father who accepted Siri's language mixing and responded to it. Siri did much more content‐word mixing with her father than with her mother, showing thereby that she leaned toward the monolingual end of the continuum with the latter and the bilingual end with the former. Genesee, Boivin, and Nicoladis 1996 recorded English‐French bilingual children as they spoke to their mother, to their father, and to a stranger who only spoke their weaker language. The more a parent switched languages during communication, the more the child did too. Thus, as in Lanza's study, children were more in a monolingual mode with parents who did not mix languages much, whereas they were more in a bilingual mode with parents who mixed languages to a greater extent (or accepted language mixing).

In the domain of language pathology, Marty and Grosjean 1998 manipulated language mode in a study that examined spoken‐language production in eight French–German aphasic bilinguals. The latter were asked to carry out a certain number of language tasks by two different experimenters—the first was a totally monolingual French speaker who knew no German, and the second was a French–German bilingual. The patients knew about the experimenters' language background before testing. The authors found that two patients could no longer control their language mode due to their pathology but the six others adapted their language behavior to the experimenter, that is they did not mix their languages with the monolingual experimenter (or, if they did do so, it was due to stress or fatigue).