Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 245

Since language mode is a cognitive phenomenon that has its roots in human interaction, it is present in many research projects, but mostly in a covert way. The consequence is that the data obtained are variable due to the fact that participants are probably situated at various points along the language‐mode continuum. In addition, the data can be ambiguous given the frequent confound between language mode and the variable under study. A few examples are examined below.

It is rare that researchers working on interferences/transfers put their bilingual participants in a strictly monolingual mode when they obtain language samples. This is unfortunate as they invariably obtain other contact phenomena such as borrowings and code switches which may not be of any interest in the study. For example, Marian and Kaushanskaya 2007 examined a database obtained in the study of autobiographical memories in bilinguals in order to observe crosslinguistic transfer and borrowing. The first author, herself also bilingual in Russian and English, interviewed all participants individually, in English in one session, and in Russian in the other. The participants were thus, de facto, in an intermediate language mode (they knew the experimenter was bilingual) and they brought in various types of contact phenomena. The types of phenomena would have been different and the number much less had participants been interviewed by monolinguals of the two languages.

A much researched psycholinguistic issue concerns the presence or absence of language‐selective processing in bilinguals, that is whether bilinguals call on two (or more) languages when listening to, or reading, one language only. Beauvillain and Grainger 1987, for example, found evidence for nonselective lexical access when bilinguals were shown interlexical homographs. The problem, however, is that the bilingual participants in their experiment had to be in a bilingual mode to complete the task: They had to read a context word in one language and then decide whether the next word, always in the other language, was a word or not in that language. It is no surprise, therefore, that a result indicating nonselective processing was obtained. Many other studies which have failed to control for language mode sufficiently well have been carried out since then and there is now a growing myth that processing is nonselective (see, e.g., Dijkstra & van Hell, 2003, and its discussion in Grosjean, 2008). A close examination of the research situations, the methodologies, and the stimuli used in these studies leads one to conclude that most of the time the other language was being activated either by top‐down or by bottom‐up factors. Hence the nonselective processing found in experiments.

Finally, in the bilingual‐language‐development literature, it has been proposed by some that children who acquire two languages simultaneously go through an early fusion stage in which the languages are in fact one system (one lexicon, one grammar, etc.). They then slowly differentiate their languages, by separating first their lexicons and then their grammars. Evidence for this has come from the observation of language mixing in very young bilingual children and from the fact that there is a gradual reduction of mixing as the child grows older. However, according to researchers such as Genesee 1989, many of these children are in a bilingual mode when recorded, that is, the caretakers are usually bilingual themselves and they are probably overheard using both languages, if not actually mixing their languages (see Goodz, 1989). Thus, as with the other studies mentioned above, language mode is a confounding factor that impinges on the results obtained.