Language Processing in Bilingual Children

This book is a collection of papers that explores the ways in which bilingual children cope with two language systems. The chapters address issues in linguistics, psychology, and education, that bear on the abilities that bilingual children use to understand language, to perform highly specialized operations with language, and to function in school settings. The chapters provide detailed analyses of how specific problems are solved, how bilingualism influences those solutions, and how the social context affects the process. Finally, the implications of these findings for policy setting and the development of bilingual-education programs are explored.

Language processing in bilingual children

Language processing in bilingual children

Edited by

ELLEN BIALYSTOK Professor, Department of Psychology York University, Ontario

I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 1991 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 Reprinted 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Language processing in bilingual children. 1. Bilingual children. Language skills. Acquisition I. Bialystok, Ellen 404.2019 Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Language processing in bilingual children / edited by Ellen Bialystok. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 37021 3 (hardback) - ISBN 0 521 37918 0 (paperback) 1. Bilingualism in children. 2. Psycholinguistics. 3. Education. Bilingual. I. Bialystock, Ellen. P115.2.L36 1991 404/.2-dc20 90-37707 CIP ISBN 0 521 37918 0 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2003

BS

Contents

List of List of tables List of contributors Preface

figures

page ix x xi xiii

Introduction ELLEN BIALYSTOK

1

Language modules and bilingual processing MICHAEL SHARWOOD SMITH

2

90

Metalinguistic dimensions of bilingual language proficiency ELLEN BIALYSTOK

7

70

Giving formal definitions: a linguistic or metalinguistic skill? CATHERINE E. SNOW, HERLINDA CANCINO, JEANNE DE TEMPLE, a n d SARA SCHLEY

6

49

Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children JIM CUMMINS

5

25

Second-language learning in children: a model of language learning in social context LILY WONG FILLMORE

4

10

Phonological processing in two languages IAN WATSON

3

1

113

Translation skill and metalinguistic awareness in bilinguals MARGUERITE MALAKOFF a n d KENJI HAKUTA

141

Contents 8

Towards an explanatory model of the interaction between bilingualism and cognitive development RAFAEL M. DIAZ a n d CYNTHIA KLINGLER

9

167

Constructive processes in bilingualism and their cognitive growth effects JANICE JOHNSON

193

10 Language, cognition, and education of bilingual children ELLEN BIALYSTOK a n d JIM CUMMINS

222

Index

233

vni

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Forster's models English six-year-old percentage Igl responses Classic discrimination/identification function Domains of language use Oral uses of language Literate uses of language Metalinguistic uses of language

IX

page 15 42 43 122 125 128 131

Tables

2.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 7.1

7.2

7.3 7.4

Averaged V.O.T. production values page 40 Means on English and French communicative adequacy (C.A.) and conversational features (C.F.) scores 97 Scores in English and French for children with home vs. school exposure to French 99 Effects of status as a bilingual on scores in English and French 100 Within-language correlations for English and French definitions scores 101 Between-language correlations for English and French definitions scores 102 Percentage of responses that were non-literal or literal translations in different translation directions and conditions 156 R2 values obtained through regression predicting translation times for words and sentences on English and Spanish proficiency, and the word-identification (W.I.) task 157 Examples of errors coded in translation tasks 158 Comparison of frequencies of error types in the story162 translation task across subjects from study 1 and study 2

Contributors

Ellen Bialystok Department of Psychology York University, Ontario Herlinda Cancino Graduate School of Education Stanford University Jim Cummins Modern Language Centre Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Cynthia Klingler Universidad de las Americas Centro de Exposiciones y Convenciones, Mexico Marguerite E. Malakoff Department of Psychology Yale University Sara Schley Graduate School of Education Harvard University

Jeanne De Temple Graduate School of Education Harvard University

Michael Sharwood Smith Instituut voor engelse University of Utrecht

Raphael M. Diaz School of Education Stanford University

Catherine E. Snow Graduate School of Education Harvard University

Kenji Hakuta School of Education Stanford University

Ian Watson Phonetics Laboratory University of Oxford

Janice Johnson Department of Psychology York University, Ontario

Lily Wong Fillmore Department of Education University of California, Berkeley

XI

Preface

I have always felt somewhat schizophrenic about two of my academic interests: second-language acquisition and bilingualism on the one hand, and psycholinguistic descriptions of first-language proficiency on the other. It is therefore particularly satisfying to be able to unite them in the production of this volume. The tension between these two interests has not only reflected an inner personal conflict between two of my own areas of research but has signified as well an external conflict between two academic subdisciplines. Editing this volume has resolved much of my personal tension. My hope is that the volume contributes as well to the goal of integrating theory and research across the subdisciplines. Most of the chapters in this volume were originally presented in the invited symposium "Language acquisition and implications for processing in bilingual children" at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in 1987. The symposium was co-chaired by Catherine Snow and myself. I am grateful to Catherine for her easy style of collaboration in that symposium and for her support and assistance in my efforts to publish the proceedings. All of the papers that were presented in that symposium have been completely revised for this volume and several new chapters have been added. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all of the contributors. In my view, these authors are among the finest scholars working in the field. I am also indebted to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council, Canada (N.S.E.R.C.) for providing me with a continuing grant to support my research and writing. Finally, I offer my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my friends, colleagues, students, and family, who supported this project and provided an environment for me in which it was possible to carry it out.

xin

Introduction ELLEN

BIALYSTOK

The study of the cognitive and linguistic achievements of bilingual children has recently become a respectable, even popular, area of inquiry in psychology and education. The issue is not new, but its history as a serious topic of research is somewhat speckled. Researchers have indulged in speculation for some time about the consequences of bilingualism for children's cognitive development, school achievement, linguistic processing, and metalinguistic abilities, but clear theoretical connections based on sound empirical data have been rare. One factor that has made the problem so difficult to study is the enormous diversity that accompanies children's bilingualism. Consider, for example, some of the conditions under which children can become bilingual. Children can learn both languages simultaneously in the home; the second language can be learned through submersion in a foreign culture (and here the relative status of the first and second language becomes critical in determining outcomes); or the second language can be learned through immersion or foreign-language classrooms with the majority-language environment. These differences undermine most attempts to identify precise conditions for second-language acquisition, the psychological factors that accompany bilingualism, and the implication of bilingualism for academic and other achievements. Where research has been attempted, the enterprise has often been rendered uninterpretable by the failure to account for, and sometimes even to acknowledge, the critical differences among these situations. Much of the early research in bilingualism was motivated by educational needs and policy but biased by particular prejudices against bilingualism (and possibly against immigrants in general). About thirty years ago, for example, the general wisdom held that bilingualism was a disorder that could be corrected through ruthless instruction in a standard majority language, pushing out of the inflicted child all traces of the invading language. This remedy was imposed despite the fact that the unwanted language was often the language of the child's home, heritage, and tradition. But the evidence was clear: immigrant children in North American schools were less successful academically than were their monolingual peers, and 1

Ellen Bialystok the only explanation that entered the imaginations of those researchers was that bilingualism was to blame. It came as a surprise, therefore, when anglophone Canadian children in the early 1970s who had been sentenced to French immersion programs and educated entirely or partially through the medium of French did not display this bilingual pathology. Clearly, bilingualism,perse, was not the culprit. There were, of course, some notable exceptions to this early style, such as Leopold's (1939-1949) seminal study of his daughter learning two languages, but these were rare. Most of the details we have about secondlanguage acquisition and the use of two languages in specific contexts, especially educational contexts, come from research paradigms developed in the 1970s. This research marked a departure from the earlier psychometric studies in that it took bilingualism as a phenomenon worthy of scientific interest in its own right and not simply as an educational complication. But like the attitudes that shaped educational policy towards bilingualism in the earlier studies, the research has been characterized by great and sometimes sudden shifts of attention between models that are in some cases antithetical to each other. Three main research approaches were initiated during the 1970s that were responsible for a proliferation of studies that had consequences for understanding language processing by bilingual children. These correspond roughly to linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic perspectives on language. Educational concerns remained relevant, but educational implications were more likely inferred from research undertaken in these other traditions. Although there was considerable work in evaluation studies, such as Canadian French Immersion and American Bilingual Education of various types, for example, these studies were in some ways parasitic on the more basic research that was setting norms of achievement for children learning a second language against which the results of those programs could be compared. Another important research orientation undertaken during that time was the neurolinguistic perspective, but that approach will not be dealt with in the present volume. It is interesting to note, nonetheless, that it was on the basis of a (possibly false) neurolinguistic argument concerning a "critical period" for second-language acquisition that the Canadian French Immersion programs found their strongest validation and subsequently rallied their greatest support (but see Johnson & Newport, 1989, for a revitalization of the critical-period view). The majority of the research relevant to investigations of bilingualism is that focused on the linguistic, or more precisely, applied linguistic perspective. The principal issue is the linguistic documentation of the course of second-language acquisition. Each linguistic description, however, entails different psycholinguistic processes to support that model. The past two decades have witnessed striking changes in the linguistic interpretation

Introduction of second-language acquisition, and correspondingly, in the psychological and educational implications that accompany each interpretation. The prevailing view at the beginning of the 1970s was based on the linguistic approach of "contrastive analysis," developed from Lado's (1957) early work and reported in Linguistics across cultures. On that view, a linguistic comparison of two languages reveals the sources of potential difficulty for the learner by identifying the aspects of the two languages that differ from each other. The psycholinguistic basis of this interpretation was the claim that language learners learned a second language by substituting targetlanguage forms and structures into what they already knew about their first language. Hence, transfer was a complete explanation for secondlanguage learning. This view was abruptly replaced in the 1970s by a claim called "creative construction," a term coined by Dulay and Burt (1975). On their view, there was no place for transfer. One learned a second language by starting all over again using the same processes that had guided first-language acquisition. It is only recently that a more balanced view has emerged, in which the obvious role of transfer is acknowledged but not offered as a complete explanation of second-language learning. A linguistic explanation of second-language learning which has achieved currency recently is based on the Chomskian view of government and binding (Chomsky, 1982). On this view, languages are learned by setting parameters in the "Language Acquisition Device," and second-language learning involves the resetting of some parameters. Transfer is explained as the influence of the parameter settings established for the first language on the values necessary for the second. The bulk of the empirical work undertaken in this linguistic tradition documented the acquisition of specific linguistic features. The fourteen English morphemes made famous by Roger Brown (1973) in his seminal longitudinal study of three children in the early stages of learning English (as a first language) achieved celebrated status. In addition, the journals were full of detailed descriptions of how learners of a particular language X mastered the Y (negation, question formation, pronominalization, past tense, etc.) of language Z. Although some of this work continues to the present, the legacy of the research of the 1970s is a meticulous body of data documenting the course of second-language learning. A second perspective for research in the 1970s was based on sociolinguistic analyses of language learning and use. An important contribution of this approach is that it documented and analyzed the critical contextual facts that distinguish one bilingual situation from another. Studies examining the social context of bilingualism led to such crucial distinctions as high- versus low-status languages, additive versus subtractive bilingualism, full versus partial control of language, and frequent versus infrequent use of the language. All of these factors were shown to be instrumental in

Ellen Bialystok the second-language acquisition process. A strong version of the sociolinguistic perspective led some to attribute the bulk of the explanation of second-language learning to social factors. John Schumann (1978) adopted this view and developed the acculturation model for secondlanguage acquisition in which he argued that social factors such as integration into the community and personal feelings of assimilation provide an explanation of second-language learning. A third type of research on bilingualism established in the 1970s was addressed to the perennial problem of why some people learned a second language more easily and more thoroughly than others. To this end, many studies of the characteristics of good and poor language learners were undertaken, assessing the role of such variables as aptitude, motivation, personality style, form of instruction, and the like on the ultimate level of proficiency achieved by the language learner. One particularly thorough example of a study of this type was conducted by Naiman et al. (1978). While no single profile of the "good language learner" ever emerged, one could no longer ignore such individual differences in making general statements about second-language learning. If nothing else, second-language learning was complex in ways that seemed irrelevant to first-language acquisition, and the contribution of the research on that problem was at least to identify some of the individual difference factors that conspired to produce that complexity. These three perspectives constitute the research heritage for the study of bilingual children. There are, however, two obvious incongruities between the problems to which this research was addressed and the problems presented by the study of bilingual children. First is the problem of age. Although some of the studies carried out since the 1970s which contributed to the existing data base examined the second-language acquisition of children, the vast majority were studies of adult second-language learners. It is still an unsolved empirical question whether or not the course of language acquisition is the same for conceptually immature children as it is for adults. The most widespread commonsense belief about secondlanguage learning, namely that children are more successful than adults, has been severely challenged with both theoretical and empirical arguments (e.g. Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978) although new evidence has begun to emerge again in support of the critical-period view (Johnson & Newport, 1989). A correct description of the similarities and differences between child and adult second-language acquisition is still pending. Second is the problem of effect. What is the consequence of having learned another language? What are the implications for the child's cognitive, linguistic, social, and educational experiences? It is primarily to this second issue that the present volume is addressed. Two recent changes in the field of language research have made the direct and explicit study of the linguistic and cognitive development of

Introduction bilingual children a timely issue. First is the "legitimization" of secondlanguage studies into mainstream linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing. Second is the shift in emphasis in psycholinguistic research from product descriptions to process models. For a long time, there was a pervasive attitude among researchers studying language acquisition that the main problem to be solved, the dominant issue, was first-language acquisition. Second-language acquisition was perhaps a variation on a theme, but of far less interest and relevance than the child's acquisition of a first language. That view, in the context of the times, may have been correct. It may be that no serious attention could be paid to something that was considered as a twist on a theme when the theme itself remained such a mystery. But we now know a great deal about first-language acquisition, and the insight that is occurring to some researchers is that we could know a great deal more if we included information about second-language learning into our theorizing. An interesting development in this regard is the completion model of language processing developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (e.g. MacWhinney, 1987). By taking seriously data about the way in which adults process a second language, they have developed a model which they offer as a valid description of language processing in general. In this way, research with second-language learners has contributed to an advance in mainstream psycholinguistic theorizing. Such developments enhance the status of studies of bilingual speakers. The second change is that research in children's cognitive and linguistic development has shifted from product descriptions of their accomplishments to process analyses of the causes of development. It is only about twenty-five years since psychology shed the shackles of behaviorism and allowed researchers to indulge in speculations and theories that included constructs such as "mind." In some current models, for example those of Robbie Case (1985), Robert Sternberg (1984), and Robert Siegler (1984), processing is attributed to hierarchically related "schemes" that the child develops as a function of specific experiences. Throughout development, the schemes continually become elaborated and restructured. These schemes, then, have the responsibility for guiding and determining the child's performance on specific tasks. Some of these models attribute excessive autonomy to such schemes (Sternberg may be a case in point) and leaves much of the important work in the hands (or mind) of some hypothetical homunculus. The important point, however, is that children's experiences determine critical aspects of their cognitive organization, and that organization is instrumental in influencing the kinds of intellectual achievements that children can attain. In these terms, it is not implausible that bilingualism is an experience that has major consequences for children's intellectual development.

Ellen Bialystok In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged in which process-oriented analyses of these types are applied to specific problems in children's linguistic development. An important part of this interest are the studies of children as they develop the ability to deal with complex uses of language, in particular the literacy skills of reading and writing. These skills have been shown to depend on specific types of language processing and the availability of a set of metalinguistic insights. Skilled readers, for example, are different from less skilled readers because they have more efficient executive schemes for processing language and they have a more elaborated understanding of language structure. The origins of early reading have been traced to types of language processing in which children can pay attention to such features of language as rhyme, alliteration, and paraphrase. Writing, too, is a complex process involving attention to specific linguistic features and integration of those features into a higher-order plan or scheme. More recently, considerable attention has been devoted to uncovering the metalinguistic skills developed by children in the early years, and the ways in which those skills interact with the child's progress in learning to read and write. In all these models, the accomplishments of reading and writing that had formerly been investigated as product descriptions (e.g. what the stages are in learning to read, what features of text make learning to read easier, what errors children make in early reading and writing) are recast as issues requiring explanation. These process models are invariably integrative, incorporating many aspects of children's competence. The contribution that the child's bilingualism might make to such linguistic processes has barely been investigated. Some research explicitly addressed to the influence that bilingualism might have on cognitive and linguistic development has in fact been undertaken throughout the decades. The early studies in the 1950s and 1960s which argued for cognitive deficit to be the consequence of bilingualism can be largely dismissed on methodological grounds. (An excellent review of these studies is presented by Kenji Hakuta (1986) in Mirror of language.) In contrast, a number of studies in the 1970s linked certain cognitive and linguistic advantages to bilingualism. Many of these studies, however, seemed to be overenthusiastic in their effort to identify positive effects for bilingualism, in spite of the fact that results were sometimes equivocal and sometimes even negative. But the optimism was a necessary political tool: only forceful argument and convincing data could dethrone the predominant view of bilingualism as a liability. The current theoretical and political ethos permits a sober and balanced examination of the influence of bilingualism on children's development. Theoretically, the models and research paradigms from which we study children's development are now sufficiently sophisticated that the complex and elusive issues involved in children's bilingualism may be addressed.

Introduction Politically, it seems less necessary to "prove" the acceptability of bilingualism for children. We are free, that is, to discover that being bilingual may in fact bring no special cognitive or linguistic benefit to children, and that finding will not threaten the existence of children in our educational system who happen to be bilingual. The chapters in this volume report research in this new tradition which examines basic processes in language acquisition and use for children who are bilingual. The ultimate aim is to develop a cognitive description for the acquisition and mastery of a second language, and to determine implications of becoming bilingual on children's language processing and language awareness. The relevant questions are whether or not bilingualism affects the way in which children process language and the insights which they subsequently derive about the structure of language. Basic questions such as the relation between first- and second-language acquisition have long been entertained, but only within these recent process models can they be properly addressed. How is the second language acquired? What role is given to the child's first language during that process? And how are the child's cognitive and linguistic resources modified (or not) as a result of having mastered two linguistic systems? The focus throughout is on the child's cognitive resources and their role in the child's development of specific types of intentional language-processing. In all cases, too, the contextual factors that define the bilingual situation are addressed. It is our belief that intensive study of the cognitive and linguistic development of bilingual children is essential, not only because of our obligation to understand the language development of those children who are bilingual, but also because of the incredibly rich source of knowledge gained from this understanding that we can apply to our study of first-language acquisition and cognitive development. The volume begins with a linguistic description of language processing that can accommodate processing in two languages. This chapter, by Sharwood Smith, sets out a clear statement of the linguistic resources recruited in ordinary language use (such as conversation) and points out how those resources might be organized for bilingual speakers (since his focus is not exclusively on children). The second chapter by Watson examines one aspect of linguistic competence, phonological ability, and reports empirical evidence for the course of the phonological development of bilingual children. These data are used to evaluate alternative models of phonological processing. The third chapter addresses acquisition. Wong Fillmore bases her discussion of the acquisition of a second language by young children on the incredibly rich longitudinal data base she and her colleagues have collected studying the language acquisition of immigrant children. She presents a model for acquisition that has three components - social, linguistic, and cognitive - and demonstrates the essential role each plays

Ellen Bialystok in a description of language acquisition. In the fourth chapter, Cummins applies one of the distinctions made by Wong Fillmore concerning the difference between individual and environmental sources of influence in acquiring language proficiency to the problem of how the first language influences the development of proficiency in the second language. He adds a further distinction between contextualized and decontextualized uses of language and demonstrates that the greatest influence is for decontextualized school-related uses of language. Snow, Cancino, De Temple, and Schley pursue this distinction in their investigation of the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to provide definitions, an important linguistic task that is quintessential^ a "school problem." Substantiating Cummins' claims, children perform comparably on this task in both their first and second languages. Bilingualism seems not to influence performance. Other kinds of language tasks do, however, show variation in performance as a function of bilingualism. These are reviewed in the sixth chapter by Bialystok. Malakoff and Hakuta are interested in the problem of translation, clearly a linguistic task available only to children who are bilingual. They ask how children do translations and what that ability reveals about their linguistic organization and processing. Diaz and Klingler, in the eighth chapter, readdress the old problem of the effect of bilingualism on intelligence. They demonstrate that more precision in the description of the child's bilingualism is necessary to make much progress with this question. They also bring a new perspective to the issue by interpreting the question from a Vygotskian viewpoint. An attempt to provide some explanatory constructs for these effects of bilingualism on cognitive growth is proposed by Johnson in the ninth chapter. A final chapter by Bialystok and Cummins summarizes the main findings concerning the language processing and language awareness of bilingual children and assesses the contribution of the last decade of research. Three themes run through these papers. First, most of the papers include reports of original research, but the emphasis in each case is on the larger issues of language processing that are relevant for bilingual children. Thus the data are used to support the more general enterprise of theory building. Second, the linguistic process or accomplishment examined in each case is in the domain of what one might call "intentional language use." These are the aspects of language that impact most directly on cognition - using language in the service of specific goals, as in reading or understanding metaphors, reflecting on language as a structured body of knowledge, as in developing linguistic awareness, and manipulating language to achieve specific ends, as in writing and translating. Third, the approach in all cases is on processing. The tacit assumption is that we are beyond the stage of inquiry in the field in which product descriptions will advance our knowledge. Further progress depends on understanding how the system works, 8

Introduction how it changes, and how it adapts. These questions can only be answered by examining mental processes.

References Brown, R. 1973. A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Case, R. 1985. Intellectual development: from birth to adulthood. New York: Academic Press. Chomsky, N. 1982. Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Dulay, H. & M. Burt 1975. Creative construction in second language learning. In M. Burt & H. Dulay (eds.), New directions in second language learning, teaching and bilingual education. Washington, DC: TESOL. Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of language: the debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books. Johnson J. S. & E. L. Newport 1989. Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60-99. Lado, R. 1957. Linguistics across cultures: applied linguistics for language teachers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Leopold, W. F. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. MacWhinney, B. 1987. Applying the competition model to bilingualism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 315-327. Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. H. Stern & A. Todesco. 1978. The good language learner. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Schumann, J. 1978. The acculturation model for second language acquisition. In R. Gingras (ed.), Second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Siegler, R. S. 1984. Mechanisms of cognitive growth: variation and selection. In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), Mechanisms of cognitive development. New York: Freeman. Snow, C. E. & M. Hoefnagel-Hohle 1978. The critical period for language acquisition: evidence from second language learning. Child Development, 49, 1114-1128. Sternberg, R. J. 1984. Mechanisms of cognitive development. A componential approach. In R. J. Sternberg (ed.). Mechanisms of cognitive development. New York: Freeman.

1

Language modules and bilingual processing MICHAEL SHARWOOD

SMITH

This chapter deals with the potential contribution of recent linguistic and psycholinguistic research to our understanding of the ways in which bilinguals (and multilinguals) process language data. The term "processing" takes on two meanings here, a developmental meaning and an on-line use meaning. Firstly, in the building up of knowledge representations (development), learners' acquisitional mechanisms need to process relevant linguistic information coming in from the environment. This is developmental processing. However, once knowledge representations become available to learners as users of their knowledge then those knowledge representations in turn need to be processed for the various uses to which learner/users want to put their language system at given moments in time. This on-line control may be called knowledge processing. In considering various aspects of developmental processing and knowledge processing in bilinguals, extrapolations will be made from some current views on how language is represented in the mind of the learner/user and reference will be made to theoretical notions from sister disciplines which have not, at least not until very recently, been developed and demonstrated in a second language context. The theoretical status of various different kinds of linguistic knowledge will be considered, ranging from the more implicit knowledge inherent in the Chomskyan notion of linguistic competence through pragmatic knowledge, to characteristically explicit knowledge about language that is freely accessible to introspection, namely metaknowledge. At each stage, the focus will be on the implications for research into bi lingual ism. The underlying theme in discussion will be the application of a "modular" approach to bilingual processing. If knowledge in general, as Fodor (1983) has argued, and even language knowledge itself, is compartmentalized into modules containing fundamentally different types of mental representation, how might this affect our understanding of how the bilingual mind stores and manipulates information relating to the different language systems available to it? Both sequential and simultaneous bilingualism will be discussed. For the former, the second language (L2) is acquired after the 10

Language modules and bilingual processing first (LI); for the latter, the child grows up acquiring two or more languages at the same time.

Modularity in the representation of knowledge The perspective to be outlined crucially involves the theoretical notion of modularity (basically following Fodor, 1983; see also Jackendoff, 1987), whereby an individual's knowledge is viewed not as a single entity but as one which involves a number of separate compartments or modules. Some of these modules are highly independent systems, the prime example being the mental grammar which lies at the heart of human linguistic ability. The precise nature of modular structure in the mind is a matter of theoretical debate. However, the advantages of viewing the mind as a modular entity are becoming clearer as the debate ensues and inevitably touches upon the interpretation of bilingual behavior. Grammatical competence, in Fodor (1983), is taken to be different in kind from more generalized "encyclopedic knowledge" such as our knowledge of history and physics, as well as our idiosyncratic knowledge of events, people and places. This important qualitative difference has to do with the fact that the grammatical processing mechanisms (which is what Fodor is principally interested in here) handle the processing of relevant sensory information independently, that is, without any help from the other knowledge systems. These grammatical mechanisms must then format that information for subsequent integration into a more global act of language comprehension or production. Moreover this processing is "rapid and mandatory," that is, it is essentially a reflex response to the input. The standard example of this sort of processing is vision, where people cannot decide to not see what is in front of them unless they actually block their field of vision by closing their eyes or turning away. In the same way, one cannot be exposed to comprehensible speech without automatically comprehending it. As has been discussed at length by Chomsky, with whom Fodor's ideas are very broadly compatible, the actual development of mental grammars, is also independent of general cognitive growth. These grammars develop by means of acquisitional mechanisms that are to a great degree constrained by principles that are biologically endowed and not available via experience. In this way, the child, in interacting with primary language data (the input) solves "Plato's problem" and comes to know much more about the grammatical structure of the target language than it has evidence for (Chomsky, 1980). This process is not at all akin to the processes involved in developing knowledge about, say, the history of the planet, or how the local library works, where development, unlike the acquisition of grammatical structure 11

Michael Sharwood Smith of a given language, can be explained by general inductive principles working on the much richer relevant evidence that is typically available via experience. This crucially involves "negative evidence," that is being continually informed about what is not possible or not permitted in the system being learned. By way of contrast, language acquisition, at least firstlanguage acquisition and quite possibly, despite appearances, a fair amount of second-language acquisition (see White, 1987), has to proceed, where the grammar (basically syntax and phonology) is concerned, with little or no negative evidence to speak of (see Lasnik, 1982, for qualifications of this position). Children do not go to school to learn to speak their mother tongue; second-language learners (who have previously become native speakers of a first language) sometimes do but the instruction they get can be fragmentary, not structured according to known principles of language acquisition and as a result, possibly very misleading, and devoid of constant and consistent individualized corrective feedback. Fodor (1983) discusses the use of grammatical knowledge at a given moment in time. Grammatical performance involves a system like the visual system which is specifically geared to processing particular kinds of information, that is grammatical information and none other than that, coming in from the environment. This system processes input automatically without deliberate activation: if someone addresses us, we cannot choose not to interpret the utterance except, as mentioned above, by blocking off the sound wave. The speech signal, once perceived, triggers an automatic response. We begin interpreting it in the same way as we automatically interpret familiar visual patterns that we perceive by means of our eyes. And, in order to speak ourselves, we normally have to simply think about what we have to say and not about the fine phonological and grammatical detail of the shapes our utterances will have to take. In this way, grammatical utterances (give or take a few slips of the tongue) are formed automatically without any conscious manipulation on our part. In fact we have no choice since we have access to only a few of our utterance-formation mechanisms. Encyclopedic knowledge is a type of "knowing about" knowledge which is more amenable to deliberate conscious control by the individual. A native speaker knows his or her language but without knowing much about it. One can deliberately select an area of encyclopedic knowledge, and reflect upon it, analyze it, test its validity, revise it and consciously learn more. In Fodor's terms, whose conception of modularity is actually much less fine-grained than others who have discussed this issue subsequently (see, in particular, Jackendoff, 1987), such knowledge falls more directly within the domain of the central processor. If encyclopedic knowledge itself can be seen as compartmentalized in some way, the thrust of the argument is that the basic building blocks are the same: the knowledge is developed 12

Language modules and bilingual processing with the same learning mechanisms and it is used in the same way. Linguistic knowledge itself, in the sense used above (as subconscious and relatively inaccessible to introspection), can also be seen as internally modular, although Fodor with his focus on knowledge processing does not discuss this. Certain aspects of that knowledge may also fall into this more general category, for example the choice of words and style to suit situations and particular speaker intentions in the production of utterances as also a whole range of morphological phenomena specific to any particular language. This implies that some parts of morphological, lexical, and pragmatic knowledge may not be part of the grammar module per se, although they are certainly part of what most of us mean by "language" (see Foster, 1985). If some aspects of linguistic knowledge share the same type of mental representation with other more general kinds of knowledge, this also means that they can be acquired and used following more general cognitive principles involving, presumably, inductive learning and some conscious manipulation during actual performance. This, again, would appear to be particularly true of metalinguistic activities. Our reflections on the formal properties of language (grammar or other aspects of a language) are most vividly represented by the case of a linguist trying to work out the rules and principles behind a particular natural language. Typically, the better we get at inductive learning and conscious manipulation of ideas, the better able we are to develop and use linguistic knowledge that falls under this category. By the same token, our ability to develop other kinds of linguistic knowledge will not reflect the same improvements. What we were good at when acquiring our first language as young, cognitively immature learners, we will be perhaps just as good at later, but certainly no better by virtue of being better at reasoning coherently. Research will no doubt cast much more light on this issue by demonstrating the clear influence of general learning principles in specific areas of the language, especially the beneficial effects of corrective feedback. It already seems intuitively reasonable to suppose that corrective feedback will be readily available with regard to the idiosyncratic use of the lexicon, where the learner refers to objects or concepts with the "wrong" words (as in "that's a pretty cat" while pointing at an ugly dog) or uses the referentially appropriate words but violates the pragmatic norms of the community (as in "Hi there, Your Highnesses" or "Salutations, guys"). To sum up, it seems that the learning conditions for different aspects of language acquisition are radically different in kind. The fact that the immature and uninstructed child does so well suggests that the learning mechanisms are specialized not only in contrast to non-linguistic learning mechanisms but also internally. In some areas, notably syntax, corrective feedback is not required and may well not be processed even when it is 13

Michael Sharwood Smith available. In other linguistic areas, it may be processed and lead to a revision of knowledge. In other words, modular treatment is also called for when developing a theory to account for language behavior itself. Modularity in on-line processing. If processing in the actual development of linguistic knowledge over time appears to require modular explanations, it is not clear that this should also be true for processing in the on-line language use sense of the word. Our hypotheses about the knowledge modules may or may not be of relevance with respect to the processing "machinery" available to access this knowledge and manipulate it actually using language on a given occasion. This aspect of language ability will be called the processing-control dimension ("control" for short): how knowledge is controlled by the performance mechanisms (see Bialystok & Sharwood Smith, 1985, for instance, for an application of this idea to second-language acquisition theory). In principle, the on-line control of qualitatively different kinds of knowledge could be non-modular, that is there could be uniform access and manipulation across different knowledge modules. Modularity in this sense would be a matter of knowledge representation, not knowledge use. And if processing control is modular, then the modules do not have, again in principle, to be the same as the knowledge modules. Recent thinking on language processing has, in fact, employed the notion of modularity. Frazier (1988) in particular argues that the evidence to date strongly suggests that language processing should be seen in terms of autonomous modules associated with but not necessarily identical with the modules defined in current generative theory, that is, modules within the grammar. This means that the speech signal is analyzed by separate autonomous modules that cannot bring information to bear from other areas to disambiguate the message on-line. In other words, the evidence suggests that until all the processing modules have done their work on the input, there is a certain level of "garden-pathing" leading to alternative-candidate interpretations being available at given points in the process. To this extent, Frazier's approach follows the seminal paper on processing by Forster (1979) in which the speech signal is analyzed in a manner as represented in figure 1.1. A crucial feature of Forster's model are the three linearly ordered processing stages represented vertically in figure 1.1, that is the phonological, syntactic, and message processors respectively. Each processor operates independently without reference to information from outside except the input from the preceding stage. Where there is ambiguity, then the particular processor currently operating must assign alternative-candidate analyses. These ambiguities may be resolved at a later stage. For example, the syntactic processor can reject, say, one of two phonologically acceptable 14

Language modules and bilingual processing message processor

general problem solver

world knowledge

i[

syntactic processor

lexicon

j

phonological processor

Figure 1.1 Forster's models

candidates (Do you like to roam/*Do you like to Rome). The message processor can reject anomalous alternatives passed on from the syntactic processor and real world knowledge can select the most suitable of any semantically well-formed alternatives passed on from the message processor. Frazier (1988) details the empirical evidence that supports the Forster model, showing how, for example, people (reading) can be temporarily garden-pathed (led towards an incorrect interpretation) even where preceding sentences contain disambiguating information to prevent this happening (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; see Frazier, 1988). As Frazier (1988) points out, research adopting quite different views of processing has strongly suggested, in contradistinction to what is predicted by Forster's model, a rapid use of different information types in some stage or other of processing. Frazier's model is an attempt to combine this idea of rapid use of different information types (phonological, syntactic, etc.) with what she sees as a strength of the Forster model, namely the autonomous, encapsulated processors. Furthermore, she tries to exploit insights into the structure of the grammar provided by recent generative linguistic research. In her autonomy model, she departs from Forster in that she claims that the evidence shows that processing cannot be serial, that is, going from one module to the next. Serial processing would require the system to generate an enormous number of alternative interpretations and hold them in store until everything was resolved in the last stage. Rather, she says, processing is done in modular fashion with structure assigned by separate subsystems with regard to very specific and welldefined principles. Hence, even within the domain of syntax itself, a string (linguistic input) can be individually analyzed with regard to, respectively, its phrase structure and the extent to which it obeys case theory (constraints on how case is assigned), binding theory (e.g. how anaphors are linked 15

Michael Sharwood Smith to given antecedents), the theta principle (roughly assigning one and one theme only to given arguments) and so on. Direct reference can thus be made to those highly constrained subsystems which, in current Chomsky an theory, apply in different combinations to produce a wide variety of natural grammars and never any humanly impossible grammars. Language processing in Frazier's model can be concurrent since the analysis of the string by one processing module is never going to conflict with the analysis of another; presumably some phonological preanalysis has to be done first in order to present candidates for concurrent processing. After this, input is presented simultaneously to different processors for analysis. A simple analogy would be the identification of a particular object, say an egg in a bed of rocks, whereby one would not first check the egg shape, using a "shape processor" against the object present in the visual field, and then the color, and then the size, using a "size processor," but rather all these parameters would be checked out concurrently - the various processors would get to work on the basic visual input provided by the first stages of processing at the same time. A final decision about the interpretation of the visual signals would thus be arrived at much more quickly. It is instructive to note, in passing, that conscious problem-solving does seem to be serial, and consequently slow and laborious and that the conscious meta-analysis of linguistic information, like a serial analysis of the visual field is also slow and laborious.

Implications for bilingual processing

Knowledge implications In simultaneous bilingual acquisition, bilingual developmental processing, that is, processing input for the development of competence, must, if we accept the arguments mentioned earlier, at least be modular in one sense. The linguistic subsystems that, by hypothesis, obtain for one language must surely obtain for the other language as well. It seems hardly likely that a second language system that is mentally represented in a quite different way should exist alongside, or be integrated into a first language system, that is, in someone who has always been bilingual. Whether second languages learned later have quite a different structure and developmental history is a matter of debate in current second-language research. However, whatever the way in which different languages are represented in the bilingual mind, evidence from crosslinguistic influence in language loss and language acquisition (see Dechert & Raupach, 1989; Gass & Selinker, 1983; Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986; Obler & Hyltenstam, 1989; Seliger & Vago, in press; Weinreich, 1953) would suggest that LI and L2 knowl16

Language modules and bilingual processing edge is not rigidly separated and that knowledge in one system can indeed affect the shape of knowledge in the other. What this precisely means with respect to the idea of autonomy or encapsulation is, of course, theory-dependent. Since knowledge is only "visible" in performance, any crosslinguistic influence between LI and L2 could still be the on-line accessing of what are still separate systems, as in codeswitching. In other words, crosslinguistic influence could be a purely realtime control phenomenon. For example, sequential bilinguals, just like simultaneous bilinguals, producing utterances that exploit their knowledge of more than one language may simply be doing this for reasons of expediency. At the same time, they may be perfectly aware of what aspects of their utterance belong to which language. The systems remain separate but their output can be combined during performance (Meisel, 1989; Sharwood Smith, 1986). If crosslinguistic influence really does take place at the knowledge level and if L2 knowledge is influenced by the structure of resident LI knowledge, then explanations about where and when crosslinguistic influence can and cannot take place should make reference to modular theories of language. It becomes vital in that case to ask how each language is represented and used. If the second language in a non-native user is encyclopedic in nature, then one would expect crosslinguistic influence to operate only between modules that shared the same general cognitive structure, for example, pragmatic knowledge. To take the way anaphoric reference works, for example, one would not expect, under this scenario, the way the firstlanguage grammar required anaphors and antecedents to be bound to be transferred to the second-language system. Since the first-language binding system is, by hypothesis, one of the autonomous processors characteristic of syntactic but not encyclopedic knowledge, one would not expect its properties to be copied on to a second-language system that was of a totally different kind. However, if the second language has the same cognitive make-up as the first language, if it is modular and non-encyclopedic in the same ways, then, in principle, crosslinguistic influence might be expected to occur at all levels (see discussion in Perecman, 1989). Control implications As far as processing control is concerned, rapid code-switching behavior in bilinguals makes it clear that different linguistic systems are often activated concurrently in production. If we consider receptive processing, and specifically how bilinguals process the speech stream, the old question arises of whether or not this is done by a bilingual system requiring a pre-setting of the language system (LI or L2) or at least a very early identification with regard to which language system was to be accessed (see Albert & 17

Michael Sharwood Smith Obler, 1978; Macnamara, 1971). It will be assumed that the clear majority view is the right one, namely that there is no neat division in bilinguals such that for each language, a totally separate, autonomous and encapsulated system is available in reception. Rather, the incoming speech is initially processed by rapid and mandatory mechanisms that make no distinction regarding what language system is expected, that is there is no preattentive language switch. This means that at the outset, at the very least, both/all language systems in the bilingual are activated. In a listening/ speaking situation, this means speech-processing and lexical access. However, it is clearly the case that different rules or routines have to be activated to continue processing efficiently once this initial stage is passed. This stage would seem to come when the phonological analysis triggers a search in the lexicon prior to the parallel, modular syntactic processing that Frazier talks about. Lexical representations in bilinguals are presumably tagged for which language system they belong to (whether or not there is any cross referencing with equivalents in the other language system) so that a search can be carried out efficiently. Lexical representations will thus contain information that triggers access to the L2 syntactic processor. It is clear that in a sequential L2 context, problems encountered at an early stage in processing the speech stream may have serious implications for later stages. Even if initial analysis of the speech stream results in the activation of a particular language-specific set of processors, those phonological processors need to be developed enough to cope with the task. If not, the processing program simply crashes - the learner registers a failure to process the utterances and perhaps attempts to guess from the context using real world knowledge. Another possibility is that the learner automatically co-opts fully developed phonological processors that are not actually appropriate, that is, "belong" to another language system. Sajavaara (1986) suggests that Finns processing English will have serious problems segmenting the speech stream if they deploy Finnish processing mechanisms that assume no consonant clusters in syllable-initial position. If segmentation runs into problems due to Finnish interference, then everything else that follows suffers. Following Frazier, this means that the learner's lexicon cannot be accessed efficiently and that subsequent stages of processing will suffer. The input will be difficult or impossible to handle. This means that Finnish learners of English will have to become aware of the syllable structure of English and, following this development in their knowledge of Finnish, devise appropriate ways of implementing this knowledge in processing incoming utterances. It also means that Finns will be considerably more successful processing graphological information where word boundaries are marked by easily perceptible spaces in the visual field. A somewhat similar illustration, this time with respect to simultaneous French-English bilinguals, was provided recently by Cutler et al, (1989). 18

Language modules and bilingual processing French, being a syllable-timed language, has clear syllable boundaries which enable French native speakers to segment the speech stream accordingly. English is stress-timed. The syllable boundaries are unclear and attempting to segment the speech stream using syllable boundaries is problematic. Cutler and her colleagues provide evidence that adult bilinguals, classifying themselves as French-dominant (albeit generally recognized by others as being native in both languages) have no problem under experimental conditions segmenting in either language. English-dominant bilinguals, on the other hand, apparently do not process the French speech stream like natives under these conditions. Cutler etal. make the intriguing point that perhaps syllable-timing is the marked option in languages in general. That is, the French-dominant learners learnt an exceptional method of segmentation and had no difficulty also segmenting via the default means when necessary (in this case with English). The English-dominant speakers had begun with the unmarked, default option and then found it difficult to switch to the exceptional, marked technique when coping with French. Cutler et al. (1989) therefore suggest that perfect bilingualism may well be a myth. In this specific example, bilinguals simply learn one method of segmenting speech and stick with it. Marked options include unmarked option, but not vice versa. While it is difficult to assess the validity of this claim without further investigation, it does at least provide a useful example of how, even at the control level, no general qualification such as "is accepted as a native" can be taken as interesting until, in modular style, a careful examination of all the various subsystems is conducted. It also shows that even in simultaneous bilinguals, who are apparently fully native in both languages, there seems to be a non-trivial degree of crosslinguistic influence. If preliminary analysis of the speech stream by bilinguals runs into problems, as in the Finnish and French examples above, we may assume that the phonological processor(s) (or presumably the graphological processors in the case of reading) represent the stage at which the system decides whether to engage one set of syntactic processors or another. A clear example would be bilinguals who have knowledge of, respectively, a configurational and non-configurational language, in other words, a language with a syntax based crucially on word order (like English) versus one which is not (like Russian, Japanese, Chinese). If processing the signal at the phonological/graphological stage results in the identification of English, then the syntactic processors to be engaged obviously have to follow configurational principles and take word order not only as stylistic but as relevant to the identification of object noun phrases and so on, that is the assignment of phrase structure. At a simple non-technical level, one could say the more fixed word-order languages require immediate attention to the order of identifiable items in a string whereas a freer-order language with a rich morphology would require that attention should be initially 19

Michael Sharwood Smith directed towards, say, inflections. If attention, for one reason or another, is misdirected, then the subsequent assignment of higher status to inflections in a fixed word-order language (probably poor in inflectional morphology anyway) would exhaust processing capacity better directed elsewhere. The result should then be an empirically observable delay in processing. Clearly, a well-defined theory of processing can be of great benefit in contributing to problems of a specifically bilingual nature.

M eta mode

So far, little has been said about the metalinguistic dimensions of knowledge and control amongst bilinguals. Children, be they bilingual or monolingual, develop language sensitivity at an early age, allowing them to appreciate and make observations and jokes about the words and structures of the language(s) they possess. This manner of thinking about language may be called operating in the meta mode. It would seem, then, that bilingual children just as monolingual children (and perhaps more so: Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins, 1976) operate in the meta mode from an early age although the nature of this operation differs from that of more mature learners by virtue of their cognitive immaturity. Older and more mature learners can make use of the more elaborate (encyclopedic) knowledge about the formal properties of language gained during formal education. For this reason it may not be helpful to distinguish metalinguistic awareness as one end of a scale which ranges from sporadic insights into aspects of language up to the highly formalized understanding of language entertained by academic linguists, that is, metalinguistic knowledge. If the modularity hypothesis as sketched above holds, then the development of metalinguistic ability from the early years onwards must be seen as separate from, and parasitic upon, the growth of intuitive linguistic ability. The child becomes able to reflect on linguistic properties only when these properties have been acquired. Both kinds of ability may be seen in terms of mental representation versus the real-time mechanisms for acting on those representations (see Bialystok, this volume). The separate nature of metalinguistic awareness is a view held by Karmiloff-Smith (1986), who sees it as an optional final stage in LI development. The idea that metalinguistic knowledge is part of what Fodor very generally calls the central processor helps us to see metalinguistic awareness/knowledge as allowing the language user to consciously reflect on and analyze language in the same way that a game of tennis or the act of riding a bicycle can be analyzed without any necessary connection between the degree of explicit knowledge of the person doing the analyzing and the actual degree of skill he or she has in the activity being analyzed. As has 20

Language modules and bilingual processing been indicated above, pragmatic knowledge, the interface between realworld, encyclopedic knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, linguistic competence, would have the same kind of open architecture as a metalinguistic knowledge. The functional aspects of these two kinds of knowledge will of course be difficult since, in order to function efficiently as a language user in given situations, it is vital to know the pragmatics of a language. Being in possession of metalinguistic knowledge, however, is not likely to play the same crucial role in one's day-to-day activities. Notice, however, that a degree of metalinguistic awareness may be important for successful social functioning: to understand the full significance of a speech or a television commercial or indeed jokes based on word-play will be a distinct advantage in dealing with fellow members of a given speech community. In any case, the development of pragmatic and metalinguistic knowledge will, by hypothesis, follow the course characteristic of encyclopedic learning, with the appropriate development of control itself typified by a slow and laborious first stage then later, smooth and automatic provided there has been enough practice, and, crucially, corrective feedback. To the extent that sequential L2 acquisition does not proceed as does first language acquisition, we also expect this pattern to emerge in other areas of the language. The metalinguistic abilities of bilin^uals may well be, as some have suggested (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins, 1976; Kessler & Quinn, 1982; Leopold, 1939-1949) superior to that of monolinguals. In the process of acquiring and using different languages, they may have much more occasion to reflect consciously upon the ways languages differ in all kinds of ways. Looking upon this from a modular point of view, metalinguistically superior language users will not necessarily be superior in their command of other levels of language: the English-dominant French speakers were still not able to segment syllabically as monolinguals do. There is good reason to suppose that the benefits will, again as some have suggested, be in terms of general cognitive development, since in both cases the relevant cognitive domain is not the language-specific module but the central processor (see Diaz & Klingler, this volume; Johnson, this volume). By the same token, metalinguistically superior people, in being more sensitive to all aspects of language that fall outside the language-specific module(s), will, ceterisparibus, be more likely to show a flexible and creative use of language in areas accessible to conscious manipulation. This throws some interesting light on the traditional insistence that learning classical languages, a metalinguistic activity par excellence, is good for mental development. Presumably, it also facilitates relevant aspects of foreign-language learning (within the domain of deliberate manipulation). From a real-time processing point of view, in that metalinguistic processing will by definition be linear and, for the average language user at least, relatively slow and 21

Michael Sharwood Smith laborious, going into the meta mode will disrupt fluent performance and, to the extent that bilingual speakers may have a more enhanced metalinguistic ability, they will have more problems with fluency where they are unable to switch the meta mode off. High-speed metalinguistic processing may be achieved, but this will only arise amongst individuals who have had a great deal of practice, and, where sophisticated structures are concerned, only occur amongst the more creative members of a speech community.

Conclusion

As the above discussion has hopefully made clear, much is to be gained from explicitly adopting some version of modularity theory in investigating psychological aspects of bilingualism. The fact that research so far has already indicated differential effects in code-switching and mixing with regard to different levels of language (Perecman, 1989) suggests an implicit modularity in some approaches anyway. Work done more directly within the domain of generative grammar, where the notion of modularity gains greater precision, turns out to be extremely relevant for understanding the bilingual mind, how bilingual knowledge is represented and how it is used. This, on reflection, is hardly surprising, since Chomskyan metatheory is essentially an attempt at illuminating problems of language acquisition. The usefulness of making a distinction between knowledge and real-time processing should be fairly clear. However, it has simply not been obvious how abstractions such as binding theory, theta theory, and case theory, for example, bear on real-time use of language. One important example here is Frazier's work, which makes it clear that the grammatical subsystems used to explicate linguistic universals may also be implicated in what has here been called knowledge processing, and, by extension, bilingual knowledge processing as well. Modularity, in combination with the knowledge/control distinction, should help us to formulate questions about all areas of bilingual ability more precisely. Depending on the kind of knowledge or processing-control mechanisms we are looking at, we can make reference to particular welldeveloped theories in sister disciplines. We are also protected against rejecting some potentially useful theory of development or processing prematurely on the grounds that it did not work for, say, the development of one particular, such as the lexicon. In addition to this, as the syllabletiming segmentation example suggested, findings in bilingual research may have interesting repercussions for the ways theoretical linguists view relationships between language types and the implications this variation has for learnability. 22

Language modules and bilingual processing References Albert, M. & L. Obler 1978. The bilingual brain. New York: Academic Press. Ben-Zeev, S. 1977. Mechanisms by which childhood bilingualism affects understanding of language and cognitive structures. In P. A. Hornby (ed.), Bilingualism: psychological, social and educational implications. New York: Academic Press. Bialystok, E. & M. Sharwood-Smith 1985. Interlanguage is not a state of mind: an evaluation of the construct for second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 6,101-107. Chomsky, N. 1980. Rules and representations. Oxford: Blackwell. Cummins, J. 1976. The influence of bilingualism on cognitive growth: a synthesis of researchfindingsand explanatory hypotheses. Working Papers on Bilingualism^, 1-43. Cutler, A., J. Mehler, D. Norris, & J. Segul 1989. Limits on bilingualism. Nature, 340,229-230. Dechert, H. & W. Raupach, 1989. Transfer in production. Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex. Ferreira, F. & C. Clifton, 1986. The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348-368. Fodor, J. 1983. Modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Foster, K. 1979. Levels of processing and the structure of the language processor. In W. E. Cooper & E. C. T. Walker (eds.), Sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Foster, S. 1985. Taking a modular approach to universals of language acquisition. Paper presented at SLRF, Los Angeles. Frazier, L. 1988. Grammar and language processing. In F. J. Newmeyer (ed.). Linguistic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gass, S. & L. Selinker 1983. Language transfer in language learning. Ann Arbor, MI: Newbury House. Jackendoff, R. 1987. Consciousness and the computational mind. New York: Academic Press. Karmiloff-Smith, A. 1986. Stage/structure versus phase/process in modelling linguistic and cognitive development. In I. Levin (ed.), Stage and structure: reopening the debate. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Kellerman, E. & M. Sharwood Smith 1986. Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kessler, C. & E. Quinn 1982. Cognitive development in bilingual environments. In B. Hartford, A. Valdman, & R. Foster (eds.). Issues in international bilingual education: the role of the vernacular. New York: Plenum Press. Lasnik, H. 1982. On certain substitutes for negative data. Paper presented at the Workshop on Learnability and Linguistic Theory, May 1982. University of Western Ontario. Leopold, W. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's child (4 vols.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Macnamara, J. 1971. The linguistic independence of bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Behaviour, 10, 480-487. Meisel, J. 1989. Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In L. Obler 23

Michael Sharwood Smith & K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Obler, L. & K. Hyltenstam (eds.), 1989. Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perecman, E. 1989. Language processing in the bilingual: evidence from language mixing. In L. Obler & K. Hyltenstam, (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sajavaara, K. 1986. Transfer and second language speech. In E. Kellerman & M. Sharwood Smith (eds.), Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition (pp. 66-79). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Seliger, H. & R. Vago, in press. Language attrition: structural and theoretical perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharwood Smith, M. 1986. The competence-control model, crosslinguistic influence and the creation of new grammars. In E. Kellerman & M. Sharwood Smith (eds.), Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. White, L. 1987. Against comprehensible input: the input hypothesis and the development of second language competence. Applied Linguistics, #, 95-110.

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2

Phonological processing in two languages IAN WATSON

Phonology is to a large extent the Cinderella of bilingual studies. The most immediately obvious aspect of speech is ironically that which has been least intensively researched with respect to bilingual speech behavior in general, and bilingual acquisition in particular. One reason for this may be its very peripherality in language processing. For the non-specialist, phonology is so predominantly concerned with the mechanics of language realization, so far removed from the broader psychological issues of cognitive development and processing, that it fails to grab the attention (even of the linguist who is a non-phonologist) in the same way as matters semantic, pragmatic, or even syntactic. These others may appeal as worthy of study not only in their own right, but also for their links with non-linguistic cognitive phenomena. The subject of phonology is in itself so complex and ridden with controversy that it is difficult to know where to start to find a conceptual framework which will permit bilingual acquisition to be investigated. Even the analysis of the adult sound system of a single language involves a plethora of theoretical choices. Is the aim a taxonomic phonemic account, and if so how does one deal with any instances of neutralization or overlapping? Should one seek underlying forms, and, if so, how abstract should they be? What about suprasegmental phenomena - will one try to give a metrical account of rhythm, what about tones/intonation, how do these interact with segments? Are there segments? How many dimensions are there? What to do about feature geometry, etc? Each of these choices will fundamentally affect one's view of how phonology works, and therefore how it can be acquired. Worse still, any one of the former may leave open a number of possible views of the latter, a point returned to below. It is thus unsurprising that, even with respect to the acquisition of phonology for monolingual children, the number of studies is very restricted, especially compared to the massive theoretical literature; there are far fewer studies on bilinguals. One of the major problems in acquisition studies lies in drawing the line between phonological and phonetic processing abilities. In a general sense, the term phonology is, of course, often used to refer to all the 25

Ian Watson sound-related aspects of language knowledge and behavior. For the generativists (e.g. Chomsky & Halle, 1968), especially, the phonological component of a grammar is that module which converts a string of lexical/ grammatical items, duly arranged into an acceptable surface structure, into what a speaker actually says. It further, by some ill-explained process, allows the hearer to decode the utterance back into a string of linguistic units. Close attention to the processes of real speech behavior, however, requires recourse to the traditional, but problematic, distinction between the underlying phonological aspects of linguistic expression and the phonetic aspects of how phonological units are realized in perception and production. In this schema, what remains under the heading true phonology is concerned with the structural use of sounds to build linguistic units. Here, one would expect, minimally, (i) information about the number of different contrasts between sounds a particular language makes use of in its lexicon; (ii) enough information about the physical identity of the sounds themselves to allow them to be kept distinct at various levels of processing; (iii) (depending on theoretical orientation) how the structures of different forms of the same lexical item vary. A child's acquisition of phonology, in this sense, is the acquisition of knowledge about the patterning of sounds in his or her native language. Phonetics, in contrast, is concerned with the processes by which a linguistic, phonological representation is turned into an acoustic signal by means of physical gestures, and with how this acoustic signal is reconverted to a linguistic representation by the perceptual system. Clearly, it is closely linked to phonology as the linguistic representation is expressed in phonological units, in phonemes or allophones. But the fact of knowing what the phonemes of a language are is no guarantee of phonetic proficiency in that language; each language has specific and different phonetic ways of realizing its phonemes in different contexts (Nolan, 1989). Thus both German and English have systems which contrast the phonemes /p/ and /b/; these contrast in word-initial position primarily because the former is aspirated and the latter is not. However, aspiration is typically longer in German than in English (Kohler, 1977). In French a similar contrast is normally realized by the presence of closure voicing in /b/, and its absence in /p/ (see, e.g., Simon & Fourcin, 1978). Furthermore, in each language, the same phonemes may be realized and distinguished by different means in positions other than word-initial. A traditional way to express this has been to associate each phoneme in a language with a set of allophones which realize it in different circumstances, but even this approach fails to yield a presentation which captures every single articulatory or acoustic parameter used by the native speaker in continuous speech, with its range of coarticulatory and stylistic variation (see, e.g., Nolan, 1982). Nor can 26

Phonological processing in two languages this range be adequately represented using the feature notations used in the different branches of generative phonology. A more useful conceptualization is one in which a phonological representation in terms of phonemes, possibly with some (largely extrinsic) allophonic variation dealt with by phonological rules, is realized by an array of routines which each native speaker has developed to translate the phonological units into an acoustic signal (via articulatory gestures) in speech production, and to translate acoustic patterns into phonological units when perceiving it. The learning of speech production and perception thus involves not only learning the phonological system, but also the identification of acoustic patterns with elements of that system and the successful imitation of those patterns. The notion that it is quite possible to achieve one of these elements without mastering the others is crucial to understanding the phonological development of children, and especially bilingual children. A further problem arises with the description of both phonological and phonetic phenomena; they are highly variable. Across different accents, identical lexical items may have different phonemic composition, either because the phonemic systems of those accents are different (compare Brittany French, which contrasts /a/ and /a/, to the modern Parisian accent, which does not), or simply because the phonemes are differently lexically distributed (Southern British English and the Midlands variety have identical monophthongal vowel systems, but in the lexical item one, the former has /A/, the latter /o/). A single phonemic unit may also have different phonetic realizations; for example, the French /p/ phoneme is normally realized without aspiration over most of France, but in some areas of the north and in Belgium is frequently aspirated (Goudailler, 1981). On a more detailed level still, even sounds which are phonetically identical will correspond to different acoustic signals when spoken by different people, or even the same people on different occasions. The task facing any child learning the phonology and phonetics of a single language is therefore highly complex. From an ever varying mass of acoustic input, he or she has to: 1. learn to recognize distinct, but non-invariant acoustic patterns; 2. deduce the set of oppositions which constitute the phonological structure of the language; 3. associate the acoustic patterns with the phonological system, despite the non-invariance of the former; 4. master the correct articulatory routines to produce acoustic patterns which satisfy other native speakers as being adequate realizations of different phonemes. Since native speakers of many, possibly all, languages have at least receptive abilities for a wide range of accents, the child will have to learn to 27

Ian Watson perform step 3, above, in a way allowing many-to-many relationships between acoustic signal and phonological unit; and since we all use different accents in different situations, he or she will have to learn different articulatory routines for various phonemes in step 4. None of the four stages outlined above is remotely well understood; indeed they represent only one of many different interpretations of how phonological competence is acquired (see Best, 1985, for a quite different view; Watson, 1985 for objections to it). It is therefore hardly surprising that modelers of bilingual language processing have tended to avoid this area. For approaching the bilingual acquisition of phonology does not merely add to the problems faced, it multiplies them. At each stage of the acquisition process, the child is faced with many more different signals, but without automatically knowing which language they belong to, while younger children cannot initially even know that they represent two different languages. After differentiation between the languages, both the differences and the similarities between the two systems may lead to interference which hampers the acquisition process. That cross-linguistic differences should cause interference is obvious: the child can easily fail to realize that a feature of one language is not shared by another. Crosslinguistic similarities are problematic when phenomena in the two languages are seductively alike, without being identical. Nevertheless, any problems caused by similarities or differences may not be serious. Provided the child's speech behavior is sufficiently close to that of other speakers of each language to allow lexical distinctions to be maintained and communication to be effected, slight infelicities in pronunciation (by monolingual standards) may not be seen as insignificant. There are certainly some bilinguals who seem to achieve monolingual-like pronunciation in both of their languages, at least as far as a phonetically trained listener can judge. Whether this is true of a small or large percentage is an empirical question, but in any case we should like to know if this group is different from those who do not achieve such a balanced performance. However, a further problem lies in deciding what the standard should be by which a balanced performance is judged. Impressionistic judgments must be supplemented by instrumental measurements, and experimental phonetics allows minute differences in individual pronunciation and perception processes to be measured, at a level of detail which is too fine to be perceptible to the best-trained ears. If there is any way in which bilinguals deviate from monolingual norms, we are in a position to know, and if this is the case, it will give us evidence that the two groups may use alternative processing strategies. Of course, monolingual norms are themselves constructs; they conceal such enormous variation that it is very difficult to be sure that a bilingual 28

Phonological processing in two languages is doing something that a monolingual would never do. We must be aware that we can, at best, note tendencies, rather than make absolute statements. To this end, in this chapter the main findings in the literature will be reviewed, not only those pertaining directly to bilinguals, but also, where relevant, those based on monolingual studies. Some new data will also be presented, from an ongoing study of phonological acquisition by FrenchEnglish bilinguals. Three main questions will be addressed in what follows. First, to what extent do bilinguals actually keep the phonological systems of their two languages separate, rather than using a partially merged system? Second, what is the relationship between production and perception? Third, how similar are the stages by which bilinguals acquire phonology to those followed by monolinguals? A hypothesis will be developed that, at least at some stages of acquisition, bilinguals do, in fact, take advantage of the variability which each speech community will accept, in order to achieve the twin aims of reducing the amount of different processing required while avoiding the pitfalls of sounding unlike most native speakers of the language.

Phonological acquisition

Two apparently contradictory claims have been made about the early stages of phonological acquisition. On the one hand there is experimental evidence that infants' early production and perceptual abilities show signs of moving towards the phonological systems of their target language. On the other, it has often been suggested that when speech begins, phonology is hardly acquired at all; Ferguson and Farwell (1975) suggest that in the beginning words and their meanings are learned whole, with no analysis into smaller phonetic units, and consequently no awareness of individual oppositions. The contradiction is resolved by detailed examination of the experimental evidence, discussed below, which suggests that any tendencies in prelinguistic infants reflect either inherent psychoacoustic limitations or phonetic, rather than phonological development. Several papers show infants either producing particular sounds or performing perceptual tasks which seem to be related to the phonological structure of the sounds around them. With respect to the first of these, although children's early vocalizations include all the sounds in the human phonetic repertoire, Locke (1986) shows an increasing tendency in the babbling stage (ages between six and nine months to eighteen months) to produce the sounds which are found in the target language. While this 29

Ian Watson is undoubtedly strong evidence that children's babbling is partly conditioned by the sounds around them, there is no need to believe that this is anything other than a phonetic phenomenon. As a preliminary to true phonological acquisition, the child directs its articulatory activity towards practicing the sounds it hears regularly; there is, however, nothing linguistic about this activity at this stage. A similar argument obtains with respect to the perceptual data. Results from tests concerned with infants' responses to synthetic voice onset time (V.O.T.) continua have suggested that the use of this measure to make categorical discriminations between phonemes differing in voicing quality is both present at a very early stage, and language-dependent. In a study of six to eight month-old infants from English and Spanish speaking environments, Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson (1979) used a head-turning procedure to identify discrimination ability. As noted above, languages differ in the way they realize voicing contrasts, a major distinction being between those like French and Spanish, which contrast initial prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, with a V.O.T. category boundary in the region of 0-15ms., and those like English and German, which contrast voiceless unaspirated (short-lag) and aspirated (long-lag; category boundary around 25 ms.). The English-environment children showed reliable discrimination only between short- and long-lag stops, in line with the English sound system. The Spanish infants were able to discriminate all three different groups: that is, they were sensitive to the contrasts used in both languages. One interpretation of this apparent imbalance in abilities has been prompted by psychoacoustic studies which show that the English contrast corresponds to a discrimination facility inherent in the mammalian auditory system (Kuhl & Miller, 1987). Non-human animals can be trained to discriminate V.O.T. continua categorically, with a category boundary in the 25ms. region. The possibility thus arises that human infants have an inbuilt predisposition to use such a boundary, which has to be changed by experience if they are exposed to a language which functions differently. Englishenvironment children would never have to make such a change, whereas those exposed to Spanish might do so, initially, by a process of suppletion rather than replacement. Even in the first few months of life, the child can thus be seen as establishing the bases of a future phonological system. However, three types of evidence argue against this interpretation. One is that much older children are far less certain in discrimination tasks, irrespective of their language, than would be expected if their very early linguistic exposure had established the phonological categories used by their language. Simon and Fourcin (1978) showed English speakers unable to label continua categorically until the age of five years, and French speakers not attaining sharp categorical labeling until the age of eight. Clearly, whatever the explanation of young infants' laboratory per30

Phonological processing in two languages formance, it does not translate directly into practically useful phonological knowledge. Besides, evidence from other perceptual tests suggests that the ability to discriminate between all three voicing categories may be less language-specific than Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson's results imply. Streeter (1976) showed that two-month-old Kikuyu infants were sensitive to both contrasts, yet, at the relevant (bilabial) place of articulation, Kikuyu use neither! Furthermore, Eilers, Wilson, and Moore (1979) showed that, although six out of eight six-month-old English-environment infants did not show any sensitivity to the prevoiced/voiceless distinction, two did, and a group of English adults reliably discriminated both. Interpretation of such conflicting evidence is difficult, but Burnham (1986) suggests that the general pattern is an initial ability to distinguish among all three categories, followed by the waning or disappearance of any discrimination skills which are not reinforced by environmental stimuli. Thus, English infants show less consistent ability to make the prevoiced/ voiceless distinction because they are not exposed to these two categories of sound in the way that Spanish children are. Nevertheless, the initial discrimination abilities may not be completely lost, because prevoiced stops do exist phonetically in English, as an allophonic variant of the unaspirated set. Similarly, Kikuyu does have a contrast between prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated stops in some places of articulation. Thus whether or not sounds of a particular phonetic type function phonemically in a language, infants may be exposed to some of them. Even the infants who seemed, according to the Eilers, Gavin, and Wilson (1979) and Eilers, Wilson, and Moore (1979) tests, not to be sensitive to this distinction may actually have been so, albeit at too low a level for their head-turning technique to show. In any case, it is implausible to attribute the discriminatory abilities of these infants to developing phonological skills. By definition, a phonological unit forms part of a linguistic system, and children of the relevant ages show no evidence of any ability to produce or understand sounds as tokens of linguistic items. Indeed, infants at this stage may well simply be cognitively incapable of distinguishing phonological classes (MacKain, 1982). The phenomena in question are rather examples of psychoacoustic or phonetic processing abilities (or possibly the development of the latter from the former; see Best, 1985; Watson 1985) at a stage when phonetic processing has not yet begun to serve linguistic needs. Unfortunately, experimental studies of bilingual-environment children in the prelinguistic stage are lacking. Longitudinal comparison between the development patterns of monolinguals and those exposed to two contrastive phonetic inputs at this prelinguistic stage might be very informative, although the apparent need for children in their early linguistic years to relearn these skills must leave a question mark over the exact relevance of early discrimination abilities. 31

Ian Watson First words There is no evidence that when the child's first words appear, they are stored, produced, and recognized as anything other than unanalyzed wholes, associated with specific situations (Barton, 1976; Ferguson & Farwell, 1975; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). An experiment by Barton (1976) showed that a number of children aged 20-24 months were unable to distinguish words on the basis of initial voicing differences without a considerable training period, suggesting that this was not a process they habitually used. Yet children are often able to produce words contrasting in this feature at this stage, the implication being that they are doing so without awareness of the phonetic/phonological units of which the words are composed. In producing these first words, they may simply be transferring to a meaningful use articulatory routines practiced during the babbling stage (Locke, 1986). As the child's vocabulary increases, it rapidly becomes uneconomic to store words as wholes. At this point words are analyzed into smaller units, probably first into syllables, then segments (Mann, 1986). However, the ability to produce appropriately sounds which, according to perceptual tests, are not categorized in an adult-like way (or, in the case of bilinguals, a monoiinguaMike way) is one which persists for many years (Carramazza et al., 1973; Simon & Fourcin, 1978). This is a paradoxical finding, both because it is also often the case that children can perceive distinctions they cannot accurately produce (see, e.g., Smith, 1973) and because, in general, children must learn their phonological systems and speech habits to a large extent by means of their perceptions of others' speech (see further discussion below). Although the early stages of phonological development in bilinguals depend on a multiplicity of factors, bilinguals are probably least different from monolinguals early in the one-word-utterance stage. The majority of the world's bilinguals are probably only initially exposed to one language, so that the first words produced will inevitably be in that language. Besides, even true primary bilinguals, that is those who have been exposed to two different languages almost equally since birth and have continued to be so exposed, are normally unconscious of being bilingual at this stage. The notion of different languages only develops around the age of two years. With the onset of true phonological awareness, two distinctions must be drawn. The first is between simultaneous and successive acquisition of the different languages. Although this is not truly a binary distinction - exposure to a second language can begin at any age - there may be significant differences in the strategies used for phonological acquisition by those who develop two systems absolutely simultaneously, and those who have at least part of one phonological system in place before the other is broached. This contrast is discussed below, in the light of what is known about monolingual acquisition at this stage. 32

Phonological processing in two languages The second contrast is that already alluded to, between production and perception. The presence of a particular sound in an appropriate place in a child's utterances is no guarantee that the child is able to discriminate that sound consistently. It may simply be an easy sound to produce, one developed at the babbling stage. Correct productions can occur without correct perception. However, the mastery of a sound system must be based on the child's correct perception of the production of others, and subsequent modification of its articulatory behavior in the light of those perceptions. In this sense, perception must normally precede production in development. There will often be sounds which children categorize correctly perceptually, but cannot produce properly. In judging a child's progress, it will be essential to monitor both aspects of speech behavior separately. It is inappropriate to assume that they are isomorphic. Monolinguals and bilinguals learning phonology Once past the one-word stage, how does phonological acquisition proceed? One view sees the process as largely one of differentiation. The child learns to recognize as separate sounds which had previously been confused. The most comprehensive attempt to explain acquisition in these terms came from Jakobson (1968), who saw the acquisition of phonological contrasts as being governed by the phonological complexity of the phonemes to be acquired, as expressed in his distinctive-feature system. There would thus be a universally applicable sequence of development, and the order in which all the phonemes used in a language are learnt would be totally determinable. A number of writers quote evidence which seems to support this view. Linell (1979) quotes the sudden differentiation of III and /k/ after a period of using only the former, and claims that when awareness of a particular opposition does come, it is applied to all the known words containing it even if these were previously confused with other words because the distinction was not known. Fourcin reports evidence of afixedorder of acquisition, typically followed by children learning English in England, and shows that the salient factor is not the frequency with which phonemes appear in the input to the young child (Fourcin, 1978). Despite this, the Jakobsonian view clearly provides an inadequate conceptual framework for investigating the processes of phonological acquisition (Elliot, 1981; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). Although phonological acquisition may be seen as being attained once the set of a language's oppositions has been mastered, the point has already been made that it is not clear what learning an individual opposition exactly means. During acquisition, perception and production are often not in synchrony, some allophones of a phoneme are learnt before others, and, despite Linell's 33

Ian Watson observation above, children often use the correct sound in one word, while substituting a different sound for it in others, especially at the stage where at least some words are still stored as gestalts (Locke, 1986; Menyuk & Menn, 1979). There is considerable variation in order and speed of acquisition across different children; individual children reach the same goal in a variety of ways. In modeling acquisition, all of these factors must be allowed their place. Most of the evidence concerning the effects of bilingualism between the ages of two and four years comes from case studies, usually based on parents' notes (there is a dearth of scientifically controlled studies of any children in this age group). The children may be divided into two groups; (i) those simultaneously acquiring two languages; (ii) those acquiring one language after another. Simultaneous bilinguals There is agreement in the literature that primary bilinguals can attain the facility to function in two different languages simultaneously, without taking twice as long - or, it seems, any significantly longer time - than a monolingual needs to acquire one. Initially, the main task is that of differentiation; with a plethora of different stimuli around him, the child must recognize first that these represent the combined output of two different linguistic systems, and then identify which elements - and in effect which categorical distinctions - belong to and constitute which system. Most bilingual children seem to be unaware that they are dealing with two different systems until the age of about two, by which time phonological development may be well under way. Leopold (1939-1949) reports that Hildegard treated all her linguistic knowledge in both English and German as forming a single system until shortly before this age. Soon after her second birthday she started to show awareness of the difference, even using the word German without having been taught it, then slowly developing a clear awareness of the two systems. Similarly, Imedadze's child, learning Russian and Georgian, first began to separate the two languages at about twenty months (Imedadze, 1967). Once the discovery is made, differentiation begins, and it immediately becomes very difficult to glean from the case studies what processes are being used. An ordinary monolingual child goes through several stages in which he simplifies the system he is trying to learn. Bilinguals simplify as well, but do so in each language and crosslinguistically. Any attempt to define patterns or rules in what they do is inevitably hampered by the problem of dominance - the condition of the child being more capable in one language than in the other, often due to greater exposure to one - which recurs, though not ostensibly, in many case studies. There is very 34

Phonological processing in two languages little documentation of balanced subjects, and those studies which do exist are uninformative about the area of interest here. Ronjat (1913) is more concerned with discussing the effect on Louie of the one language one person principle; neither Celce-Murcia (1978, an essentially synchronic study) nor Pavlovich (1920), while claiming that their subjects mastered their two systems simultaneously, go into detail. Amazingly, these three are almost alone in describing fairly balanced subjects. Leopold's Hildegard was exposed far more to one language than the other for long periods. Of course, perfectly balanced bilinguals are almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, there may be different processes of differentiation corresponding to greater or lesser degrees of dominance, and the lack of clear information on this in the literature is frustrating. Leopold considered that Hildegard had perfected her English phonology between the ages of three and four, but her German system was not completely native-like until the age of five, when she spent a protracted period in Germany. The problems seem to have been both phonetic and phonological, in that she could neither accurately pronounce nor accurately distinguish the front rounded vowels which are a feature of German, but not of English. On her return from her visit to Germany, Hildegard had become dominant in German, and for a time exemplified the other major problem faced by bilinguals who are dominant in one language; the difficulty of preventing the incursion of one (already formed) language system on the domain of the other - of avoiding interference, as defined by Weinreich (1953). After four weeks in a totally German environment, Hildegard was reported as speaking English with a marked German accent; on her return to the U.S. A. this problem disappeared, and she began to have low-level phonetic problems in pronouncing German. It seems quite possible that Hildegard may have attained differentiation, at least in the latter stages, by a process of superimposing the unknown system on the known, that is, by using the first system as a base, and building onto it additions and alterations. In other words, she might to a large extent be using a procedure known to be used by secondary bilinguals (although this does not totally account for phonological learning in secondary bilinguals; see Anderson, 1981). Of course, balanced primary bilinguals might do the same to a certain degree, especially if their two languages are such that the phonological system of one is much more easily learnt than that of the other; in this case the learning of the former might in fact facilitate that of the latter. But it also seems possible that a more balanced subject might use a different method, starting with an averaged system which has contrastive patterns and perceptual category boundaries intermediate between the two target systems and slowly and more or less simultaneously moving away from this in either direction towards the differential phonologies. In all prob35

Ian Watson ability both balanced and non-balanced children may use both strategies, the only difference being one of emphasis. (Partly) consecutive bilingualism Fantini's Mario underwent a different pattern of exposure to his languages, resulting in a different pattern of phonological acquisition (Fantini, 1985). It is a difficult pattern to characterize. Fantini himself refers to Mario as "one whose mother tongue is Spanish, but whose initial contact with English was only slightly delayed . . . hence a 'simultaneous' bilingual" (Fantini, 1985, p.37), but indicates that at the age of two, when phonological acquisition was well under way, his son was only an incipient bilingual', indeed Mario's first productive use of English postdated that of Spanish by a year. The case serves to illustrate the arbitrariness of such labels, but Mario contrasts with the earlier cases cited in the slightness of his exposure to the second of his languages at this stage, and for our purpose he will be treated as a consecutive bilingual. Fantini's account of Mario's phonological development is based on Jakobsonian principles, although he does also give important details of allophonic variation. Differentiation was a protracted process for the child. His Spanish consonantal system was almost complete at the age of 2 years 6 months, at which stage he used virtually no English sounds other than those which had close equivalents in Spanish. The correct patterns for English began to appear only after the near-completion of the Spanish, in a quick burst from 2 years 6 months to three years - though aspiration of unvoiced consonants did not appear till three years and two months. Even then, the two systems were not properly differentiated in production; the /th/ and /dh/ sounds were not mastered until the age of six, and numerous Spanishinfluenced pronunciations (/x/ for /h/) remained until this stage. Nevertheless, by the age of five, a phoneme-perception test demonstrated that Mario was clearly able to distinguish correctly all the English phonemes. Mario also showed some signs of interference from English in his Spanish pronunciation. Once he had mastered the English aspirated consonants, he began inappropriately to aspirate certain Spanish consonants. Possibly the imperfect separation of his two sound systems facilitated this interference. It is far clearer in this case than in Hildegard's that one phonological system was developed by building out from the other. This is not to say that all of Mario's English system was developed in this way; there may also have been some independent developments. The /th/ phoneme may be one example of this. Its late development is, as Fantini points out, common among monolinguals. Two conclusions may be drawn from this survey of the development of the phonological system. The first is that the developing bilingual does 36

Phonological processing in two languages have to learn processing skills which are unnecessary for the monolingual. He or she has to recognize that a sound system is entirely arbitrary, in that it is possible to use more than one to communicate. He or she must therefore learn to assign similar physical events to different systems of oppositions according to the linguistic context. This can be done effectively, with certain provisos, noted in the next section. However, each phonological system is not necessarily acquired in a way analogous to monolingual acquisition (though it may be that procedure is possible). Commonly, one system, or at least aspects of it, will dominate the other, so that the child fails to make some oppositions in one language, or at least produces some sounds in a foreign way, due to interference. The second, more negative, conclusion is that remarkably little is known about this essential stage in bilinguals' development. We lack instrumental data, and have almost no data at all on completely balanced primary bilinguals. The absence of experimental data means that we cannot be certain how far claims of monolingual-like abilities in both languages are valid; there are examples from modern phonetic research of distinctions which are consistently made in speech, but which even trained phoneticians cannot detect. Fortunately, there are far more studies of children aged from four upwards; these are discussed in the next section. Older children With a few exceptions, by the age of four or soon afterwards, children have a fully developed phonological system. This means that they are capable of recognizing all the phonemic distinctions in their target language, and also of pronouncing the words of that language in a way judged acceptable by other native speakers. It does not guarantee that all the parameters involved in their speech perception and production correspond to those used by adult speakers. In this section, evidence is reviewed that in both of these areas bilinguals, while apparently highly proficient in both their languages, may actually exhibit different strategies from monolinguals. Some preliminary results from an ongoing project comparing French and English mono- and bilinguals are discussed which suggest that the latter sometimes choose phonetic options which reduce the difficulties created by their need to use two systems, without thereby sounding in any way abnormal in either. A favorite investigation area for child perception in general, and bilinguals in particular, is the voicing distinction between cognate word-initial stop consonants. This is particularly suitable because, although children apparently master the voicing contrast at an early stage, neither their production nor their perception of the various acoustic features associated with it is adult-like for a number of years. Furthermore, as already noted, the realization of this contrast is highly variable cross37

Ian Watson linguistically. Simon and Fourcin (1978) showed that one acoustic feature used distinctively, V.O.T., was not used categorically in perception until the age of four by a group of English-speaking monolinguals, and not until eight or nine by French monolinguals. A second feature, the presence of a voice-excited Fl transition, is only reliably distinctive in English, and was learnt by the English group by the age of eight, and not at all by the French group. It has also repeatedly been shown that children's productions of V.O.T. distinctions only slowly move towards adult norms. Similarly, Ohde (1985), in a production study, showed that variations in fundamental frequency consistently found in adult subjects were not found in six-year-olds. This combination of a protracted learning period and crosslinguistic differences gives an excellent tool for the comparison of monolingual and bilingual phonetic development. Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo (1980) and Konefal and Fokes (1981), both measured V.O.T. in the productions of Spanish-English bilingual children. Bond's subjects were two sisters, aged four and seven, the latter being severely language-disordered. Both were successive bilinguals, and indeed had only been learning English for six months; the older had reached only the two-word utterance stage in English, but the latter was "beginning to speak English in school" presumably with some fluency. Strikingly, the younger child had clearly differentiated V.O.T. patterns for her stops in the two languages, with figures corresponding well to monolingual norms. She prevoiced her voiced Spanish stops, aspirated her voiceless English stops, and produced Spanish voiceless and English voiced tokens in the short-lag region. The older child, in contrast, produced all her Spanish stops in the short-lag region - a pattern typical of younger children. Konefal and Fokes' subjects were three sisters, aged four, seven and ten, who also had Spanish as their mother tongue. The ten-year-old was language-disordered. All three had been exposed to English for three years at the time of the study. Again, the two normal children show clearly differentiated patterns in their two languages. The younger one contrasts with the four-year-old in the earlier study in that her Spanish voiced stops were concentrated in the short-lag region, with the voiceless set spanning the upper part of that region and the long-lag region. The seven-year-old, however, like Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo's four-year-old, consistently prevoiced Spanish /b, d, g/, and had short lags in /p, t, k/. Both children contrasted short- and long-lag stops in English although the younger of them did this less consistently, with a number of longer V.O.T.s in the voiced set. The oldest, disordered child showed considerable overlap between the two categories in both languages. The normal developmental pattern for V.O.T. production is for all stops to be produced in the short-lag range initially, with production extended, as appropriate for the language, to the long-lag or prevoiced ranges (Zlatin 38

Phonological processing in two languages & Koenigsknecht, 1976). For some children this process of extension may not be complete until well after the fourth year. We cannot, therefore, necessarily interpret the lack of prevoicing in Konefol and Fokes' four-yearold as being ascribable to English-Spanish interference. In fact, all of the normal subjects in these two studies seem to offer strong confirmation that, with respect to V.O.T., developing bilinguals can relatively easily produce different patterns in two different languages, even when those patterns are contradictory, in the sense that Spanish voiced stops and English voiceless ones are both in the short-lag region. The mastery of such duality of patterning seems to require very little time; Bond, Eddey, and Bermejo's four-year-old had achieved it in six months, although she had the advantage of coming to her second language at an age when V.O.T. production is rapidly developing in many children - and hence, perhaps, easily modified. But if in the overall pattern of V.O.T. development, bilinguals are similar to monolinguals, there is nonetheless evidence that their realizations of voicing contrasts do have some significant differences. Watson (in press) reports on a study comparing monolingual and bilingual development of a number of acoustic features associated with the voicing contrasts in English and French; two, V.O.T. and Fl onset frequency, will be discussed here. Bilinguals and monolinguals aged six and ten were compared, and there were also adult control groups. One of the striking results was the variability in productions, even by the monolingual adults. In French, phonologically voiced stops were most frequently prevoiced, but there were many instances where they were produced in the short-lag region, or were prevoiced, but with a break in the voicing during or immediately after closure (see Goudailler, 1983). French voiceless stops were sometimes significantly aspirated. Both of these tendencies were more pronounced in the child groups; indeed the monolinguals showed a strong tendency to aspirate velars. This tendency did not diminish between the two age groups. (See table 2.1.) The bilinguals showed a more consistent trend to reduce voice onset times with age, especially for the Frencn voiced tokens. However, they also produced the voiceless series with more aspiration than the monolinguals in both age groups and in both languages. This series thus comes to resemble the English series more than is typical for monolinguals (although their English voiceless stops are even more aspirated). This increase in aspiration results in a second disparity between the bilinguals and the monolinguals. In English there is a consistent, and perceptually salient, difference in the onset frequency of thefirstformant in vowels following voiced and voiceless stops; this follows inevitably from the presence of a period of aspiration in the latter, and its absence in the former. Because French does not systematically use aspiration, this difference is rarely present and has been shown to be perceptually unimportant 39

Ian Watson Table 2.1

Averaged V.O. T. production values

Subject group

Voiced

(a) V.O.T. velar- English (values in ms.) Bilingual 6-year-olds 37.5 Bilingual 10-year-olds 25.5 Monolingual 6-year-olds 30.05 Monolingual 10-year-olds 29.9 Monolingual adults 23.5 (b) V.O.T. velar-French (values in Bilingual 6-year-olds Bilingual 10-year-olds Monolingual 6-year-olds Monolingual 10-year-olds Monolingual adults

ms.) *29.9 *20.0 *33.1 *22.1 *10.5

Voiceless 105.4 103.2 84.1 94.0 62.0 68.7 65.2 58.2 60.9 28.5

Note: * before a figure indicates that the majority of tokens in this category had at least some prevoicing. However, there was also considerable aspiration in some tokens. The figure given here takes no account of prevoicing.

(Simon & Fourcin, 1978). The bilinguals in this study resembled the monolingual English subjects in their English speech, having a clear, statistically significant distinction for this feature. But they also showed such a distinction in their French productions, albeit a smaller one than in English. None of the French monolingual groups had any statistically significant difference in this feature, although there was a slight tendency in the same direction. For both of these parameters, the bilinguals' productions in French are systematically different from those of their monolingual peers, while in English their V.O.T.s are longer for the voiceless series. Nevertheless, given the intermittent tendency of the monolinguals to produce these same features, it is not the case that individual utterances by bilinguals would be distinguishable from monolinguals' utterances. This reflects the impressionistic judgments of both the children's own teachers and native speakers to whom the recordings have been played that there is nothing obvious which distinguishes the bilinguals' speech from that of monolinguals in either language. It is thus possible for bilinguals to use different production routines from monolinguals in their realization of the phonemes of their two languages, without this being perceptible to other native speakers. Just as hearers are not aware that children in both languages habitually produce longer V.O.T.s than adults, the differences between monolinguals and bilinguals go unnoticed. A compromise seems to be reached by the bilingual between the two needs to sound sufficiently like a native speaker to conform to two different language communities and to reduce the pro40

Phonological processing in two languages cessing load of having to master two different phonetic repertoires. Without matching exactly the norms of monolinguals of his or her age group, he or she finds a way of remaining within the limits of acceptability. Perceptual studies In the light of the infant studies, there is a surprising dearth of studies of perception by bilingual children. This may be a disguised blessing, as there is strong evidence that many of the results of perceptual tests carried out on monolinguals and on adults are misleading, because the stimuli used were insufficiently natural to evoke responses typical of normal speech behavior. Investigations of the voicing contrast are prime offenders (Watson, 1983; Williams, 1977). A wide range of acoustic cues can be identified with voicing perception (Lisker, 1978; Watson, 1983) and there is evidence that different languages, and even different subjects, attach different importance to different cues (see, e.g., Bailey, Summerfield, & Dorman, 1977); furthermore, there are interactions between different cues. If a set of test stimuli lack a feature which is highly salient for a particular group or subject, their responses may be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, such tests are potentially valuable as a source of knowledge about differences in monolingual and bilingual perceptual processing. Those studies which have been carried out indicate that there are more substantial differences in this aspect of speech behavior than in production. They also, therefore, point to considerable asymmetry in bilinguals' perceptual and production routines. As part of an ongoing study by the author, an experiment was carried out whose object was to compare the perceptual development with respect to English of a group of English-French bilinguals to that of the monolingual group tested by Simon and Fourcin (1978). The stimuli were identical to those used by Simon and Fourcin. Subjects were groups of primary balanced bilinguals who were living in England, but being educated in French, and those also experienced some French at home. There were four age groups; five, six, eight, and ten years. Simon and Fourcin's results had shown that by the age of five, English monolinguals already showed sharply categorical labeling of the V.O.T. continuum. The five-year-old bilinguals, however, showed quasi-random labeling, with a tendency to judge as voiced stimuli with very long V.O.T.s. By the age of six, they had almost caught up with the monolinguals, although their labeling was not quite as categorical as the latter group's. There was no disparity by the age of eight. A second aspect of the test compared sensitivity to a second acoustic feature, the Fl transition discussed above. The results for the five-year-olds were again chaotic, but the six-year-olds were clearly sensitive to the presence or absence of the cue. In its absence, the category boundary 41

Ian Watson

V.O.T.(ms.) Figure 2.1 English six-year-olds' percentage /g/ responses. The percentage of /g/ responses obtained from stimuli with (natural) and without (flat) a rising transition following the release burst

is lowered from about 26ms. to 20ms. (figure 2.1), a disparity which increases in the eight- and ten-year-old groups to 26ms. vs. 15 ms. There is thus a relative delay in the attainment of a stage of perceptual development by the bilinguals, but not one which has long-lasting consequences. There is no evidence that their perceptual processing strategies are any different from those of monolinguals. Obviously, an investigation of their perception in French, which is under way, may further elucidate this result. This finding runs counter to those of two studies of adult bilingual perception, which, however, pertain to bilinguals in quite different social situations. Carramazza et al. (1973) compared Canadian French-English bilingual to monolingual speakers of both languages. The bilinguals were all native speakers of French, but had learnt English from, at the latest, their seventh birthdays. The responses of the two monolingual groups showed the classic pattern found in such tests: quite distinct crossover points from voiced to voiceless categorization (figure 2.2), although the monolingual French group showed a less sharp crossover than the English. The bilinguals, however, showed virtually no cross-language differentiation in their response patterns. They were more categorical in their responses than the French monolinguals, but less than the English, and the point on the V.O.T. continuum where they crossed from predominantly voiced to voiceless judgments was intermediate between those shown by the two mono42

Phonological processing in two languages 120 100

c S

X X X X X X

H—h

Voiced

80H

Voiceless

60-

Discrimination

40Discrimination/ identification overlap

200

1 ) 1 ) 1

X K K

-20 0

20

40

60

80

V.O.T.(ms.)

Figure 2.2 Classic discrimination/identification function. The classic pattern of matched identification and discrimination typically found in V.O.T. categorization tests. The change from voiced judgments (line marked with vertical dashes) to voiceless (line marked with crosses) is very sharp and rapid, and corresponds to a peak in the discriminability of tokens which are adjacent on the continuum (unmarked line)

lingual groups. This in no way reflected their productions in either language, which corresponded closely to the monolingual norms. Similarly, Williams (1977) found that a group of eight Spanish-English secondary bilinguals, screened to be well balanced, kept their two languages quite distinct in producing voicing contrasts, but responded to a V.O.T. categorization (perception) task similarly in both language conditions. There was considerable intersubject variation in where the boundary was situated, with five subjects placing nearer the typical English boundary, and three near the Spanish boundary. Williams attributes these results to three phenomena. One is the composition of his stimuli, which included perceptually salient cues other than V.O.T. for English, but not for Spanish. The second is the hypothesis that the bilingual may make more use of these other cues than the monolingual, exposure to two different systems focusing attention on those features which are most distinctive in each language. Obviously, a failure to categorize a V.O.T. continuum differently in different conditions in the laboratory does not equate with a perceptual deficit in a real language situation. Finally, he indicated that there may genuinely be more variability in the perceptual use of acoustic cues by bilinguals. There is, then, ample evidence that in perception, the experience of 43

Ian Watson a bilingual upbringing can lead to the use of rather different strategies from those used by monolinguals, although the similarity in acquisition pattern between bilingual children and monolinguals in English demonstrates that this is not necessarily so. The disparity may be due to a difference in processing patterns between those who are already bilingual at the time of their first phonological development, and those who are consecutive bilinguals. However, far more detailed study of the responses of different types of bilinguals to different acoustic cues is needed before clear conclusions can be drawn. Considerable attention should obviously also be paid to individuals' results, in the light of Williams' identification of considerable variability in responses. In both production and perception, therefore, studies of older children (and adults) suggest that bilinguals behave in ways which are at once distinct from monolinguals and very similar to them. Bilinguals modify the same variables in the production of both their languages as monolinguals, within approximately the same limits, but within these limits the details of their use of these variables may differ. Their perceptual use of acoustic cues to phonemic identity may differ, although it may be less that they use different cues, than that they attribute different weightings to them. There does seem to be a disparity between the production and perception habits of bilinguals which is not found in monolinguals; this is an area where further research is urgently needed. Conclusions

Differentiation, avoidance of interference, learning to categorize acoustic input in two contrasting ways are all tasks which must be carried out by the bilingual and which the monolingual escapes. Obviously, all of these assume a degree of mental processing, involving strategies which will remain undeveloped in those exposed to only one language. The nature of these strategies may vary from individual to individual, and according to the type of bilingualism. However, having to adopt different strategies during phonological development does not necessarily entail the use of different processes once this development is complete. It would be quite possible, despite differences in the acquisition process, for a perfectly balanced bilingual to have two completely independent phonological and phonetic systems, each identical in all ways to those of monolinguals. On the other hand, there could be a degree of integration between the two systems. Or, as a third possibility, the bilingual may have two systems, but which differ in some way from those of monolinguals. The studies reviewed and described here support this third possibility, at least with respect to production. There is undoubtedly an early stage 44

Phonological processing in two languages when the two systems are mixed, but this is due to the undifferentiated state of the two languages as a whole. After differentiation, the children described in the literature clearly develop two sound systems, but there is variation in the correspondence of these systems to those of monolinguals, especially in their phonetic detail. At the phonemic level, even children who are dominant in one language seem to achieve a near-perfect match with monolinguals in both languages. In their productions they may, however, retain noticeable traces of interference in the realizations of particular phonemes, that is at the phonetic level. Such interference is not universal. All of the perceptual studies reported above had subjects who in their productions were, at least for the variables tested, impressionistically indistinguishable from monolinguals. Their productions were not, however, identical when measured instrumentally. In the case of the English-French subjects tested by Watson (in press) there was a tendency to produce voiceless stops in a similar way across the two languages. This might be indicative of an economy in the use of phonetic, articulatory routines, in a case where such an economy does not threaten either the satisfactory realization of the two different systems or the identification of the bilingual with either of the language communities. More widespread differences were found in perceptual processing. One (unlikely) interpretation of these would be that even subjects whose systems are separated with respect to production have a common system for perception. Such a situation would be likely to prejudice overt language behavior. It is more likely that these subjects do have two different sets of perceptual routines, but that these were not revealed in the experiments. Because the tests carried out have taken as their starting point features known to be salient for monolinguals, they have revealed when bilinguals do not use such features. They have, inevitably, been less effective at revealing what other features, less salient for monolinguals, they use instead. It is also possible that if more widespread experiments are performed, a greater degree of variation will be found in the perceptual processing of monolinguals than is currently recognized. As with production, we may find that bilinguals rarely use strategies monolinguals never use, but they do use them with different frequencies. The number of unanswered questions in the area of bilingual phonology is still enormously high. With the massive increase in bilingual studies over recent years, and the increasing availability of phonetic instrumentation, there is no excuse for these questions not to be tackled, especially at a time when interest in speech processing but almost exclusively monolingual speech processing - has never been higher. It is high time to invite Cinderella to the ball. 45

Ian Watson References Anderson, J. 1981. Considerations on phonological assessment. In J. G. Erickson & D. R. Omark (eds.), Communicative assessment of the bilingual bicultural child. Baltimore: University Park Press. Bailey, P. J., Q. Summerfield, & M. Dorman 1977. On the identification of sinewave analogues of certain speech sounds. Has kins Laboratory Status Report, 51152, 1-25.

Barton, D. P. 1976. The role of perception in the acquisition of speech. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. Best, C. T. 1985. Discovering messages in the medium: speech perception and the prelinguistic infant. Haskins Laboratory Status Report, 81, 139-180. Bond, Z. S., J. E. Eddey, & J. J. Bermejo 1980. VOT del Espanol to English: comparison of a language-disordered and normal child. Journal of Phonetics, 8,287-291. Burnham, D. K. 1986. Developmental loss of speech perception: exposure to and experience with afirstlanguage. Applied Psycholinguistics, 7, 207-240. Carramazza, A., G. H. Yeni-Komshian, E. G. Zurif, & E. Carbone 1973. The acquisition of a new phonological contrast: the case of stop consonants in French-English bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 54, 421-428. Celce-Murcia, M. 1978. The simultaneous acquisition of English and French in a two-year old child. In E. Hatch (ed.), Second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Chomsky, N. & M. Halle 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row. Eilers, R. E., W. Gavin, & W. R. Wilson 1979. Linguistic experience and phonemic perception in infancy: a cross linguistic study. Child Development, 50, 14-18. Eilers, R. E., W. R. Wilson, & J. M. Moore 1979. Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time. Journal of Child Language, 6, 1-18. Elliot, A. J. 1981. Child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fantini, A. E. 1985. Language acquisition of a bilingual child: a sociolinguistic perspective (to age ten). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ferguson, C. & C. B. Farwell 1975. Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language, 57, 419-439. Fourcin, A. J. 1978. Acoustic patterns and speech acquisition. In N. Waterson & P. Snow (eds.), The development of communication. London: Wiley. Goudailler, J.-P. 1981. Exemple de traitement de Topposition de "sonorite" par les enfants du cours preparatoire - utilisation de la methode electroglottographique. Montreal: 12emes Journees d'Etudes sur la Parole. 1983. Diverses possibilites de materialisation du trait de voisement: etude electroglottographique des occlusives d'enfants ages de 7-8 ans d'un Cours Elementaire. lleme I.C.A., Paris, 267-270. Imedadze, N. V. 1967. On the psychological nature of child speech formation under conditions of exposure to two languages. International Journal of Psychology, 2, 129-132. 46

Phonological processing in two languages Jakobson, R. 1977. Child language: aphasia and phonological universals. The Hague: Mouton. Kohler, K. 1977. Einfuhrung in der Phonetik des Deutschen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Konefal, J. A. & J. Fokes 1981. Voice onset time: The development of Spanish/ English distinction in normal and language disordered children. Journal of Phonetics, 9, 443-444. Kuhl, P. K. & J. Miller, 1978. Speech perception by the chinchilla: identification functions for synthetic VOT stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 63, 905-917. Leopold, W. P. 1939-1949. Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's child (4 vols.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Linell, P. 1979. Psychological reality in phonology: a theoretical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lisker, L. 1978. Rabid vs. rapid: a catalogue of acoustic features that may cue the distinction. Haskins Laboratory Status Report, 54, 127-132. Locke, J. 1986. Speech perception and the emergent lexicon: an ethological approach. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.), Language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, MacKain, K. S. 1982. Assessing the role of experience on infants' speech discrimination. Journal of Child Language, 7, 527-542. Mann, V. A. 1985. Phonological awareness: nature and nurture both contribute. Annual Bulletin, Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 19, 95-110. Menyuk, P. & L. Menn 1979. Early strategies for the perception and production of words and sounds. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (ed.), Language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolan, F. J. 1982. The nature of phonetic representations. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 1. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. 1989. The descriptive role of segments: evidence from assimilation. Paper presented at the second conference on laboratory phonology, Edinburgh. Ohde, R. N. 1985. Fundamental frequency correlates of stop consonant voicing and vowel quality in the speech of preadolescent children. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 78, 1554-1561. Pavlovich, M. 1920. Le langage enfantin: acquisition du serbe et du frangais par un enfant serbe. Paris: Champion. Ronjat, J. 1913. Le developpement du langage observe chez un enfant bilingue. Paris: Champion. Simon, C. & A. J. Fourcin 1978. Cross-language study of speech pattern learning. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 63, 925-935. Smith, N. V. 1973. The acquisition of phonology: a case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Streeter, L. A. 1976. Language perception of 2 month old infants shows effects of both innate mechanisms and experience. Nature, 259, 39-41. Watson, I. M. C. 1983. Cues to the voicing contrast: a survey. Cambridge Papers 47

Ian Watson in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 2. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. 1985. Direct perception of speech. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics, 4. Cambridge University: Department of Linguistics. In press. Acquiring the voicing contrast in French. A comparative study of monolingual and bilingual children. In W. Ayres-Bennett, W. Green, & J. N. Green (eds.), Variation and change in French. London: Routledge. Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. Williams, L. 1977. The perception of stop-consonant voicing by Spanish-English bilinguals. Perception and Psychophysics, 21, 287-297. Zlatin, M. & R. Koenigsknecht 1976. Development of the voicing contrast. A comparison of voice onset time values in stop perception and production. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research ,19, 92-111.

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3

Second-language learning in children: a model of language learning in social context LILY WONG FILLMORE

In this chapter I discuss a view of language learning that has evolved from a decade and a half long period of research on the learning of English by young children for whom English is a second language. My goals in a series of longitudinal studies have been to understand the nature of the process, and to discover what causes the variation that exist among learners in respect to the ease with which they learn the new language. I have been particularly interested in the interplay of cognitive and social factors in the learners, with situational and linguistic factors in the settings in which learning takes place. In all, I have studied the development of English in well over 200 five- to eleven-year-old children, some of them for as long as three years. In this chapter, I discuss the model of language learning that emerged from that decade and a half long program of research. The word 'emerge' is used advisedly. The model was not an a priori view of language learning that led to the sequence of studies mentioned above: it evolved post hoc as I attempted to reconcile the sometimes contradictory findings from the investigations of individual factors in language learning. The first set of such factors examined were learner characteristics that earlier research (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Schumann, 1978; Swain & Burnaby, 1976; Wong Fillmore, 1976, 1979) suggested were key contributors to variation in second-language learning. Among them were those aspects of personality and social style that can affect the learner's ability and inclination to interact with people who speak the target language and who can help with its learning: for example, sociability, communicative need, risk taking, and selfconfidence. Other learner characteristics examined were ones that were likely to affect the cognitive aspects of language learning: inductive reasoning, verbal memory, and pattern recognition - aspects of cognitive functioning that could affect the ease with which learners recalled and made sense of the language they heard people using, and detected the regularities that existed within such samples of speech. The main hypotheses tested in that research were that each of such social and cognitive characteristics contributed to 49

Lily Wong Fillmore variation in language learning, and that collectively they were predictive of speed and accuracy in language learning. The results from this line of research have been mixed, as they have been for other researchers (Beebe, 1983; Bialystok & Frohlich, 1977; Naiman et al., 1978; Rossier, 1976; Strong, 1982). The characteristics that are supposed to facilitate language learning have been found to be positively associated with rapid second-language development in some situations, but not in others (Wong Fillmore, 1983, 1989a). For example, children who score high in measures of sociability and communicative need are generally good learners, but only in social settings where they are outnumbered by speakers of the target language, and where speakers and learners can interact freely with one another. In such settings, the extent to which children interact with one another depends on two factors. The first - the learner's social style and communicative needs - affects the learner's ability to establish and maintain contact with speakers of the target language. The second relates to the availability of speakers of the target language, and their willingness and ability to interact with the learner in ways that promote language development. In such situations, then, the learner's social skills and styles proved to be important variables. Social characteristics such as sociability and communicative needs are far less useful as predictors of language-learning outcome in settings where there are many more learners than there are speakers of the target language, or where there is little freedom for the two groups to interact. In fact, it appears that if either condition obtains, social characteristics are not particularly useful as predictors. In one of the classrooms we studied, 40 per cent of the children who entered school at the beginning of the year had learned no English by the end of it (Wong Fillmore, 1982). Some of the children who did not learn English that year were ones we predicted would have difficulty. They were shy, reclusive, laconic, or socially inept. The others were quite the opposite. They were among the most socially skilled, outgoing and verbal children in the class. The children were free to interact with classmates, but because most of the children in the class were non-English speakers, they spent their time interacting with one another in their native languages or in learner varieties of English. The more sociable the child the greater the time spent interacting with peers, it appeared. The teacher and her assistant spoke English exclusively and the children might have learned English from them, but they did not because of the way the teachers structured their class. The class was one in which most of the instruction activities were "child-selected" and directed. The teacher and her assistant created a rich environment where there were many activities to select from, and freedom for the children to interact with one another while they worked. There were few instances of teacher-directed instructional activities, or 50

Second-language learning in children formal instruction over the course of the year. The teachers monitored the children's activities closely, and they discussed their work with them and instructed them largely on an individual basis. These interactions provided the children opportunities to hear and learn English, but they were not frequent enough for most of the learners to sustain their languagelearning efforts. In another classroom we studied, one that was structured quite differently but with essentially the same student composition, sociability and communicative need were less predictive of language-learning outcomes than were characteristics such as verbal memory and pattern recognition. This class was tightly structured by the teachers. Virtually every activity was teacher directed and controlled. The children had few opportunities to interact with one another in instructed activities, so their social inclinations and skills played relatively little part in getting access to speakers of English. They heard and practiced English during formal instructional activities, where learner characteristics such as attentiveness, verbal memory, and pattern recognition were more important than the social ones being discussed. Thus, it would appear that if learner characteristics are predictive of variation in second-language learning, they are not predictive in any simple or straightforward manner. This line of investigation did, however, reveal additional sources of variation to be examined, and ways to explain why the findings on learner variables have been as mixed as they are. The variation we find across learners in acquiring second languages simply cannot be accounted for by differences in learners alone. Other sources of variation can be found in the settings in which languages are learned as well as in the speakers who are providing access to the target language and assistance in learning it. Since then, I have investigated the extent to which variation in language learning stems from differences in target-language speakers and in the settings which bring learners and speakers together (Wong Fillmore et ai, 1985). The findings of these investigations dovetail nicely with studies that other second-language researchers have conducted in Canada and elsewhere (especially Cummins & Swain, 1986; Ellis, 1984; Harley etal., 1987; Lightbown, 1983; van Lier, 1988), and from this collective work, the following model of second-language learning has emerged. A model of language learning in social context The model is a complex social one, and is difficult to talk about in purely abstract terms. It is easier to show how its components fit together when they are discussed in relation to situations that are familiar to all of us. Typically, second-language learners in societies like the United States or Canada are members of immigrant families. The family speaks a language 51

Lily Wong Fillmore other than English, and continues to use it in the home and in the immigrant community. At the same time, however, the members of the family know they will have to learn English in order to get along in their adopted society. English is the key to getting acquainted with the people who live there, to getting an education, and most importantly, to getting jobs. They have a genuine need to learn the language, and are motivated to do so because it offers them access to the social and economic life of the community they are joining. Nonetheless, learning this new language is an enormously complex task. Each individual in the family will have to discover what the speakers of the target language know that allows them to speak and use it for social and communicative purposes. The language learner's task consists of figuring out and learning the full system of linguistic, social, and pragmatic rules that govern the language behavior of the speech community. Despite the complexity of the task most individuals can handle it. People, irrespective of background, do not come to the language learning task empty handed: in their efforts to figure out how the new language is used by its speakers, they are guided by prior social, linguistic, and general world knowledge. As members of one language community, they know what sorts of things people talk about, and they know in general what kinds of verbal behaviors are appropriate for a variety of social situations and settings. They have some understanding of what they will have to learn to say in English. In learning the new language, they will be looking for ways to express the thoughts and sentiments they need to express, and to achieve the communicative goals they customarily accomplish in their primary speech community. The immigrant family is in an ideal situation for language learning since it resides in a setting that provides generous exposure to the language in use. The members of the family can hear and learn the language in the workplace, classroom, neighborhood, and playground - wherever they come into contact with people who speak the target language well enough to help them learn it. Language learning requires the help and involvement of people who already speak it: their speech behavior allows the learners to figure out how the language works, provided they are mindful and considerate of the learners' linguistic limitations. The model's components The language-learning situation I have outlined contains the necessary ingredients for second-language learning. There are three major components: (1) learners who realize that they need to learn the target language (TL) and are motivated to do so; (2) speakers of the target language who know it well enough to provide the learners with access to the language and the help they need for learning it; and (3) a social setting which brings 52

Second-language learning in children learners and TL speakers into frequent enough contact to make language learning possible. All three components are necessary. If any of them is dysfunctional, language learning will be difficult, or even impossible. When all three are ideal, language learning is assured. Each of them can vary in a great many ways, however, and some of this variation can critically affect the processes by which language is learned. These are the three essential components of the model. Three types of processes come into play in language learning, each of them intricately connected with the others. These can be described as (1) social, (2) linguistic, and (3) cognitive. I will discuss each in turn. Social processes. By social processes, I refer to the steps taken by learners and TL speakers to create a social setting in which communication by means of the target language is possible and desired. Social processes figure in language learning in the following way. Learners ordinarily require social contact with people who speak the TL to learn their language. These contacts give the learners both the incentive and the opportunity to learn the new language. They allow the learners to observe the language as it is used by TL speakers in natural communication, such observations providing the learners with the linguistic and social data that eventually allow them to figure out how the language is structured and used. In the course of these contacts, learners have to make the speakers aware of their special linguistic needs, and get them to make whatever accommodations and adjustments are necessary for successful communication - a difficult task. Communication with learners is never easy because it takes special thought and effort to make oneself understood, and to figure out what the learner is trying to say. Many people find the effort unrewarding, and try to avoid such contacts. If the TL speakers happen to know the learners' LI (first language), they may find it easier to communicate by means of the shared language. When that happens, the contacts between learners and TL speakers obviously do not provide any exposure to the new language. In interactions in which the TL is used, the learners have to participate at some level, since the quality of their participation plays a crucial role in getting speakers to use the language in the special ways that make the speech samples from these contacts usable as language-learning data. When TL speakers and learners interact, both sides have to co-operate in order for communication to take place. The learners make use of their social knowledge to figure out what people might be saying, given the social situation. The learners assume that the speech used by the speakers is relevant to the immediate situation; if the TL speakers are being cooperative, this will indeed be true. This is possible when the social settings in which learning takes place provide meaningful contacts between learners 53

Lily Wong Fillmore and speakers of the language. Those situations that promote frequent contacts are the best, especially if the contacts last long enough to give learners ample opportunity to observe people using the language for a variety of communicative purposes. Those which also permit learners to engage in the frequent use of the language with speakers are even better. Linguistic processes. By linguistic processes I refer to the ways in which assumptions held by the speakers of the target language cause them to speak as they do in talking to learners - in other words, to select, modify, and support the linguistic data they produce for the sake of the learner. On the learners' side there are assumptions about the way language works that cause them to interpret the linguistic data they have available to them. Linguistic processes figure in language acquisition in several crucial ways. The first intersects with the social processes described above, and in a sense, involves linguistic processes principally from the perspective of the speakers of the target language as they interact with learners. In essence, what learners have to get out of these contacts is enough linguistic evidence to allow them to discover how the language works and how people use it. The end product of the acquisition process is linguistic knowledge the phonological, lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic knowledge that eventually allows learners to speak and comprehend the new language in a full range of social and communicative situations. What it takes to acquire this kind of knowledge is exposure to linguistic data in the form of situationally anchored speech produced by speakers of the language in the context of social interaction that involves the learner in one way or another. These linguistic data, together with the supporting social context in which the data are anchored, constitute what researchers studying first- and second-language acquisition refer to as "input" - the materials on which learners can base their acquisition of the language. Language produced by speakers in social contacts with learners can serve as input when it has been produced with the learners' special needs in mind. It is not ordinary language, but language which has been selected for content, and modified in form and presentation. It tends to be structurally simpler, more redundant and repetitive, and is characterized by greater structural regularity than is found in ordinary usage (Gaies, 1979; Hatch, 1983; Long, 1981, 1983). Krashen (1982) has argued that for language to serve as input, it must be "comprehensible" to the learner - well enough anchored situationally for its meaning to be completely recoverable from the context of use. Others who have examined the nature of the language used in native-non-native speaker discourse have argued that what is even more important is that modifications occur as learners negotiate with TL speakers on the meaning of the discourse that takes place between them (Gass & Varonis, 1985; Pica & Doughty, 1985; Tarone, 1981). 54

Second-language learning in children Linguistic processes figure in the making of these adjustments in that people generally operate with some sort of theory of what their language is like, and they have beliefs about the kind of adjustments they ought to make when talking to anyone who is not fully proficient in their language - as when talking to babies, or to foreigners. The modifications that speakers make in talking to language learners are based partly on notions they have about what people who do not know the language well would find difficult to understand, and what they would find easy. Studies of the phenomenon of "foreigner-talk" (Clyne, 1968,1982; Ferguson, 1977) suggest that modifications made by speakers on the basis of a priori beliefs about the relative difficulty of linguistic forms are not always helpful to learners, and can, in fact, mislead them as to what the target forms are like. More useful accommodations are based on actual feedback provided by the learners as to whether or not they understand what is being said to them. When learners appear to understand, speakers can assume that the adjustments they are making are appropriate or even unnecessary. When they appear not to understand or to be having difficulty following what is said, then the speakers make adjustments in the form of what they are saying, or they do something else, verbally or otherwise, to allow the learners to figure out what is being communicated. In an important sense, then, it can be seen that learners and speakers collaborate in producing the adjustments which benefit the learners. This leads to the second way in which linguistic processes appear to figure in language acquisition, a way that intersects with cognitive processes. Looked at from the learners' perspective, the initial problem in language learning is to make sense of what people are saying in the new language. In part, this is achieved by paying close attention to what is happening while people are talking, and by assuming a relationship between speech and the events in which it occurs. The learner must guess what people might be saying given the social situation at hand. This might seem like an impossible task, but second-language learners have special resources to help them in this effort. They have a prior language and thereby the means to make educated guesses about what people are likely to talk about or say in a variety of situations. Because they already have a language, they know about linguistic categories such as lexical item, clause, and phrase. This awareness of grammatical form and structure will predispose them to look for equivalent properties in the new language data they have available to them. Similarly, through the experiences they have had in their first language, learners are generally knowledgeable about the speech acts and functions that can be performed linguistically. They know about the uses of declarative and interrogative structures, about affirmation and negation, about expressions of certainty and uncertainty in speech, and the like. They have used and are therefore familiar with such 55

Lily Wong Fillmore forms for making requests, promises, denials, declarations, and questions. They know that one can ask questions, and that questions ordinarily require answers. They know that questions can serve as requests for information, as indirect requests for action, as greetings, and for a host of other communicative functions. This kind of prior linguistic knowledge and experience will lead secondlanguage learners to seek and to discover the means for accomplishing the same functions in the new language. In other words, they are guided in their language-learning efforts by what they know to be possible and useful from their knowledge of the first language. Thus, second-language learners start out with a fairly good idea of what to look for in the new language. The assumption that forms will be found in the L2 which are functionally equivalent to LI forms can lead learners to acquire them more efficiently than they might otherwise. At the same time, however, it can also interfere with learning, since this assumption sometimes leads learners to draw largely unwarranted conclusions that L2 forms are functionally and structurally identical to LI forms and usages. When that happens, wefindfirst-languageinterference or transfer. Overall, however, the result of this process is positive. By applying the knowledge they have of what people are likely to say in various social situations to what they know are possible forms, patterns, and functions in language, learners are more or less able to give meaningful interpretations to the language they hear, and thus, to discover eventually the principles that govern the structure and use of the language itself. Cognitive processes. The third type of process in language learning is that which can be described as cognitive. In a sense the cognitive processes in acquisition are the central ones since they involve the analytical procedures and operations that take place in the heads of learners and ultimately result in the acquisition of the language. Let us consider what the cognitive task involves. The primary linguistic data which learners have available to them as input for their analyses consist of speech samples produced by speakers of the target language during social contacts in which the learners are themselves participants, as I have argued. Hence what the learners have to work with are observations of the social situations in which the language was produced, and streams of vocal sounds produced by speakers according to complex and abstract systems of grammatical and social rules that systematically and symbolically link up sounds, meaning representations, and communicative intentions. What they must do with these data is discover the system of rules the speakers of the language are following, synthesize this knowledge into a grammar, and then make it their own by internalizing it. That in capsule form is what the cognitive task is for any language learner. 56

Second-language learning in children Figuring out how the speakers of the target language are using the noises they produce to represent meaning is the first step (Peters, 1983, 1985). This involves discovering the principles by which segments of the speech produced by TL speakers relate to events, ideas, experiences, objects, and the other things that people are known to talk about. Discovering how the speech serving as input segments, that is, figuring out where one thing ends and another begins, is critical to the procedure. Once the learners know what the units are, they can figure out how they are used to represent meanings. They eventually discover how such units can be assembled structurally to communicate more complex ideas and thoughts in the target language. Finally, the cognitive task involves figuring out the principles by which the speakers of the language use it to achieve their communicative goals and intentions: what do the speakers of the language talk about, and what can they do with the language they speak? Learners apply a host of cognitive strategies and skills to deal with the task at hand: they have to make use of associative skills, memory, social knowledge, and inferential skills in trying to figure out what people are talking about. They use whatever analytical skills they have to figure out relationships between forms, functions, and meanings. They have to make use of memory, pattern recognition, induction, categorization, generalization, inference, and the like to figure out the structural principles by which the forms of the language can be combined, and meanings modified by changes and deletions. Such cognitive tools can be described as general cognitive mechanisms. Some language-learning theorists would object to this claim. According to the prevailing linguistic theory, a special cognitive mechanism is involved in language acquisition (Chomsky, 1965, 1975). This mechanism, which is referred to as the "language-acquisition device," or L.A.D., is said to operate in a quite different way from ordinary cognitive processes. Its workings cannot be observed; they can only be inferred from the fact that all ordinary children learn a first language, and that they appear to do it in ways that cannot be explained by ordinary cognitive processes. One of the major arguments for the cognitive processes involved in acquisition being special ones is that many of the features of the grammar that learners eventually acquire cannot simply be induced from the linguistic data that are available to them. In fact, the argument goes, it would be impossible to explain how children can arrive at structure as complex and subtle as found in a competence grammar, based on the relatively meager structural evidence they are able to extract from the language spoken around them, unless we assume that a certain amount of that structure is already available to the child's innate language-learning mechanism. By this view of acquisition, the processes that have been described here as social and linguistic are regarded as incidental or peripheral phenomena. If they figure at all, 57

Lily Wong Fillmore they play only trivial roles; everything that is really important in language learning has to do with the working of L.A.D. Adherents to the L.A.D. proposal have argued that no matter what other kinds of information or help are available to learners, the primary data they have to work with are samples of speech consisting of phonological signals which are not cognitively penetrable - they are not tractable to ordinary cognitive manipulations or analytical procedures that are available to children. The only explanation to people who hold this view is that such rules are already 'known' to the acquisition device in some abstract sense, requiring only exposure to data in which such rules figure, to trigger their discovery. That may be the case in first-language learning. Nearly everyone does in fact end up learning a first language, despite considerable differences in general intellectual endowment and early language experiences, and no matter how difficult or complex the target language. It does not seem to be true in the case of languages after the first, where great differences can be found in language-learning ability across individuals. What I believe to be the case is this: language learning involves two kinds of cognitive processes, both those which are specialized for language learning (i.e., of the L.A.D. type), and those which are involved in more general intellectual functioning. In first-language learning, mechanisms of the first type figure more heavily than do the second. In fact, the cognitive skills of the second type are just developing while children are acquiring their first languages. By the time individuals are likely to find themselves learning a second language, however, such general cognitive skills are well developed. They figure in whatever cognitive tasks the individuals encounter, including the ones involved in learning a new language. The L.A.D.-type mechanisms that are said to figure so heavily in first-language learning may also figure in second-language learning. In fact, I would argue that both types of cognitive mechanisms are involved in language learning, whether the learner is dealing with a first or a second language. The degree of involvement of these two types of mechanisms is reversed, however, for second-language learning. While specialized language-learning mechanisms figure in an important way too, general cognitive mechanisms are more heavily involved. This, in fact, may be a crucial difference between first- and secondlanguage learning. There are two kinds of evidence for believing that general cognitive abilities and strategies figure more heavily in the acquisition of second languages than specialized abilities do. The first consists of observations of strategies that learners appear to follow when they tackle a second language (Bialystok, 1983,1984; Faerch & Kasper, 1980,1983; Klein, 1986; Klein & Dittmar, 1979; Meisel, 1983; Selinker, 1972; Wong Fillmore, 1976). The second relates to observations of individual variation in the learning 58

Second-language learning in children of second languages (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Naiman etal., 1978; Wong Fillmore, 1979, 1983). The kind of cognitive strategies and skills that I have described in this chapter - namely, the ones we find learners applying in getting access to the language, in breaking it down into units, in figuring out its structural properties, and in extracting its principles of usage - make use of general cognitive mechanisms rather than specialized ones. The cognitive work learners engage in results in them figuring out and acquiring a lot of rules, principles, and patterns, etc. But such materials do not necessarily add up to a grammar. At some point, the knowledge which has been gained through the workings of general cognitive mechanisms must be consolidated and assembled, in a manner of speaking, into a competence grammar. This, I would argue, is where the language-specific cognitive mechanisms come into play; through these processes, what the learner has sorted out gets synthesized into a competence grammar, and perhaps a lot of the details of the grammar get refined here as well; that is the work of the L.A.D. or whatever one wishes to call the innate language-learning mechanism people seem to have. This last part, I admit, is speculative: there is no way of proving or disproving it. Variation in components These, then, are the processes that figure in language learning. We can now consider how they work, or do not work, in relation to variation in the components that have been identified: learners, speakers of the target language, and the social setting. Let us return to the example of the typical language learners in this society. The adults in the family typically come into contact with TL speakers in the workplace, in bureaucratic and service encounters, in informal social settings or in adult-education classrooms. Adult language classes are seldom ideal settings for language learning, however, since there is in most cases just one TL speaker (the teacher) to support the efforts of many language learners (the students). How well they work for language learning depends on the adequacy of the teacher's methods and materials, and the receptiveness of the students to formal language instruction. The kind of language the learners hear and practice in such settings can vary considerably in its richness and usefulness. Bureaucratic and service encounters can generally be dismissed as major opportunities for language learning. The interactions they invite between learners and TL speakers seldom last long enough, are repeated frequently enough, or provide enough incentive for the TL speakers to assist the learners to support language learning. Such encounters may motivate the learner to learn the language (in order to participate more successfully at future such 59

Lily Wong Fillmore encounters), but they do not offer the learner much support for learning the language. Far better for language learning are informal social encounters with TL speakers, and encounters with them in the workplace. In most cases, however, the language limitations of the immigrant adult preclude jobs or friendships that require much TL communication. In the United States, the jobs that adult newcomers are likely to get are ones where most of their co-workers are also non-English speakers, or ones in which they do not need to interact much with English speakers. Thus, a non-English speaker seeking a job in a restaurant is more likely to get a job as a dishwasher or busboy than as a waiter or bartender. Such jobs work against language learning in two ways: they neither require the adult to use much English, nor do they offer much support for learning the language. From the language learner's perspective, the best jobs are ones that put the learner in close proximity to TL-speaking co-workers, and which require co-operation between workers to do what has to be done. The TL speakers are then motivated to communicate with the learners and help them learn the language, and the learners are motivated to do their part as well. None of the settings that the adult members of the immigrant family find themselves in, and few of the TL speakers they encounter can provide or match the support that is available to the children, however. The children of immigrant families are in the best position to learn a new language. They come into contact with speakers of the TL in school which, in many respects, is the ideal social setting for language learning (Ellis, 1984; van Lier, 1988). It was noted that language learning is possible when learners are in frequent contact with speakers of the target language, and the two groups are motivated and able to interact with each other in some fashion. Typically, immigrant children find themselves in classrooms surrounded by English speakers. In such a setting the social conditions for language learning outlined earlier are easily enough met. The learners are in constant social contact with speakers of the target language. The speakers (the teachers especially, but classmates as well) have ample reason to interact with the learners in this setting, and they are generally aware of the learners' limitations in the language. In their efforts to communicate with learners, they tend not to depend on speech alone but to accompany their speech with actions, or to give access to meaning in other ways. What the learners must do is observe carefully what is happening while others speak, listen to what they are saying, figure out what they are talking about, and how they do it. They apply their prior social and linguistic knowledge in making sense of their observations, and eventually, by exercise of general cognitive strategies they discover what speakers know that allows them to communicate in the target language. This is easier for some learners than for others. Let us consider the question of variation in second-language learning, 60

Second-language learning in children since this is what leads to the argument that general rather than specialized cognitive processes are involved in second-language learning, and that social and linguistic processes play the roles I have described. Variation in learners One of the most striking differences between first- and second-language learning is in the relative amounts of individual variation that can be found among the two types of learners. Clearly, there is variation to be found even among first-language learners (Nelson, 1981; Peters, 1977, 1983). The differences, however, are not regarded as great. While children may vary somewhat in their rate of primary language development, the variation among first-language learners is minor compared to that found even among relatively young second-language learners. Differences of up to five years can be found in the time children take to get a working command of a new language. Learners differ considerably both in how easily and how completely they master the grammatical details and intricacies of a second language. Some are able to learn it as completely and as well as they did their first language; others never completely master the forms or uses of the language. A substantial portion of this variation may be due precisely to the involvement of the kind of cognitive mechanisms that have been identified here as the ones that figure most heavily in second-language learning. Individuals apparently do not vary in having an innate capacity to learn language. If this mechanism were as heavily involved in the learning of second languages as it is said to be in the learning of first languages, we would not expect to find any more variation in second-language learning than in first-language learning. But if, as I have argued, the kind of cognitive processes that are involved in second-language learning are the ones which relate to general cognitive abilities, the variation makes sense. We know that there are considerable differences across individuals in such abilities. The differences in ability that figure in language learning (verbal memory, auditory perception, pattern recognition, and so on) are not ones that figure heavily in general intelligence, although some of them obviously are related (for example, categorization, generalization, and association). The point is that much of the variability found in second-language learning can be traced to differences found among learners in the application of these general mechanisms and abilities that figure in language learning. Learners who have poor auditory memory will have a difficult time remembering the things they hear in a new language. If they cannot remember what they hear, they will not find it easy to figure out what it means or how it is structured. Those who are poor in auditory perception will have difficulty discriminating the sounds of the new language, and hence will have 61

Lily Wong Fillmore difficulty making sense of what they hear and reproducing it. Learners who are poor in pattern recognition will have difficulty finding the patterns they must eventually acquire in the new language. Variation in language learning along the cognitive dimension is not just a matter of differences in learner endowments in cognitive abilities, however. It is also affected by other learner variables. Age is an obvious one. Research has shown that older learners have an advantage over younger learners with certain aspects of second languages (Ervin-Tripp, 1974; Krashen, Long, & Scarcella, 1979; Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978). It has been argued that older learners acquire new structures and forms more rapidly and easily because they have better-developed learning strategies and cognitive abilities. But the cognitive advantages that come with age and experience do not always result in better language learning for older learners. Social and communicative needs, which become increasingly complex with age, can interfere with the process. In learning a new language, it is necessary initially to suppress both social and communicative needs to a degree. Learners must interact with TL speakers in order to get needed exposure to the language and assistance in learning it. They do not share a common language, however, so this kind of interaction is not easy. Learners cannot say all they need or want to say, nor can they establish themselves socially with the TL speakers as they might if they spoke their language. What they need are ways to interact and talk without much actual communication at an informational level. There are many more opportunities for young children to interact in this manner than there are for older ones, and for children in general than for adults. Children can play together without much real talk, but there are few ways for older learners to interact with one another without it. I have observed kindergarten-age language learners working and playing with classmates hour after hour, unhampered by the fact that they do not understand one another. By the third and fourth grade, children at eight or nine years of age not only have fewer opportunities for this kind of interaction, but they are much more hamstrung by the inability to communicate easily with one another. Thus, it appears that one way in which young learners have an advantage over older ones is that their social circumstances make it relatively easier for them to interact with TL speakers in ways that support language learning. Personality is another type of variable that can interact with age differences to affect both the social and cognitive processes involved in language learning. Personal characteristics which may not hinder language learning in young children may become major problems later in life. As individuals mature, there is an increasing investment in their views of self and in the traits they regard as their own. One personality characteristic in particular whose influence increases 62

Second-language learning in children with age is mental rigidity, a trait which varies considerably from person to person. Learning a new language requires an individual to consider multiple possibilities, and to avoid making premature decisions about the meanings and uses of the forms they are learning. Learners who are rigid in their thinking find it difficult to deal with multiple possibilities, or with things they cannot immediately understand. Unfortunately, there is much of that to deal with in the learning of a new language. The unwillingness or inability to accommodate new information or the unknown can make it extremely difficult for learners to handle many of the aspects of the task that I have outlined. Another personality or cognitive-style characteristic that can affect language learning relates to risk taking (Beebe, 1983). Language learning requires learners to apply inferential skills in figuring out what people are saying in the language, and in discovering how the language they hear relates to the social situations in which it is used. Some learners find it hard to take the risks involved in acting upon information gained through guessing, and in fact may be unwilling to risk much guessing at all. They find it hard to try out whatever knowledge they have acquired of the new language by their observations because they are afraid of being wrong, or of appearing foolish. Or they find it difficult to take the next step in language learning, which is to draw generalizations from the relationships they discover, and to test them out. Whatever the problem, the cognitive processes that should be operating do not function as they should for some learners, and as a result, they do not learn as quickly or well as they might. Variation in settings and TL speakers Studies of variation in second-language learning offer evidence of ways in which TL speakers and the social settings affect the social and linguistic processes that figure in acquisition, too. Let us first consider ways in which characteristics of social settings affect the social processes involved in language learning. Social settings vary in the opportunities they offer for learning language; these are partly a function of their composition (that is, the ratio of TL speakers to language learners), and partly a function of their structure and purpose. As noted earlier, social settings work best for language learning when TL speakers outnumber learners, and when they are structured in ways that maximize interaction between the two groups. Some settings provide learners with few opportunities to get close enough to speakers of the language to do them any good, or the kinds of contacts they provide are inadequate for language-learning purposes. The contacts may be too brief, or too infrequent, or too limiting in the kind of exchanges they allow. It was noted that classrooms are perhaps the ideal setting for language 63

Lily Wong Fillmore learning. But even classrooms can differ widely in the quality and quantity of input they provide learners (Allen etaL, in press; Lagaretta, 1979; Wong Fillmore, 1982, 1989b; Wong Fillmore et al., 1985). If learners outnumber TL speakers, the learners may not have enough contact with speakers. If the TL speakers are themselves imperfect speakers of the language, the kind of input they provide for learners may not be an adequate representation of what the learners ought to be aiming at. This has been well documented in the immersion classrooms that have been studied both in Canada and in the United States (Campbell, 1984; Cummins & Swain, 1986; Lambert, 1984; Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Snow, Galvan, & Campbell, 1980; Swain, 1984, 1988; Swain & Lapkin, 1982). Classrooms for language learning can also differ in the extent to which they require the learners themselves to play a role in getting the social contact needed for language learning, and in the role interaction itself plays in the process (Ellis, 1984; van Lier, 1988). It has long been assumed that direct interaction between learners and speakers is necessary in order for language learning to take place. But in our classroom research, we have found that some learners can in fact pick up a language pretty much by observing their teachers and peers, despite having little direct interaction with them (Wong Fillmore, 1983; Wong Fillmore et al., 1985). The ability to do so depends on the structure of the classroom settings, the kind of language used in them, and the characteristics of the individual learners. Children who lack the inclination or skills to interact socially with TL speakers can nevertheless learn the language, provided the setting offers them access to meaningful input, and opportunities to practice the language in the context of structured instructional activities. It appears that what is essential is that learners have access to language that is appropriately modified for them, and is used in ways that allow learners to discover its formal and pragmatic properties. This is a function not only of social settings, but of the TL speakers in them too. There were among the classrooms I have studied ones in which the English used by teachers for group instruction worked so well as input that all of the language learners in the class profited from the experience, irrespective of whether they were inclined to interact with speakers of the target language (Wong Fillmore, 1982). The children who make the best use of such opportunities are ones who score relatively high in the learner characteristics that appear to influence the cognitive processes involved in language, are highly motivated, and attentive enough to learn by observation. When there are regular activities that both invite and support the use of the target language in the context of learning about subject matter that is made relevant and interesting to the children, they learn the language, with or without much additional informal social contact with speakers. But classrooms, as noted earlier, can vary considerably as settings for language learning. Differences in structure and in class composition 64

Second-language learning in children are two important ways in which they can affect language learning. Differences in TL speakers in those classes can as well. TL-speaker variables figure in the process by affecting the quality and quantity of support available to language learners. Individuals who play the role of "TL speaker" have to know the language well enough to provide reliable samples of it for the learners to work on. In classrooms (for example, Canadian and American immersion programs) where nearly everyone is a language learner, the speech the children hear most often is produced by learners like themselves: it represents an interlanguage rather than a mature form of the target language (Selinker, Swain, & Dumas, 1975). Whether or not children in such situations can learn a standard variety of the language depends on their getting enough help from the TL speakers in the setting who do know the language well enough to support their efforts. If their teachers, who presumably are proficient speakers of the TL, provide them with enough opportunities to hear and use the language, and if they provide them with adequate corrective feedback when they use learner forms of the language, they do. But as Swain and her colleagues have found in their studies of language learning in Canadian immersion classrooms, little of the necessary feedback is provided in some cases (Swain, 1988). Attitudes and beliefs held by the TL speakers can affect the role they need to play in language learning. The ones that most critically affect their willingness to interact with the learners and the manner in which they do so are the following: how they feel about interacting with the learners; what they regard as their responsibility to the learners; what they believe about their own ability to communicate with the learners and about the learners' ability to understand and to speak; and what they think would be helpful to the learners. Individuals differ considerably in such matters. TL speakers who believe that their language-learning interlocutors will not comprehend authentic instances of the language may engage in the use of inappropriate adjustments, with the result that the input that is available to the learner is "foreigner talk" (Clyne, 1968, 1982; Ferguson, 1977). Or the speaker may bejieve that adjustments are unnecessary; in which case, the speech they use in interacting with learners may be incomprehensible to the learners. Or, if the TL speaker believes that the learners are not able to understand the language at all, they can abandon efforts to communicate by use of the target language. If they share a common language with the learners, they use it. If they do not, they try to communicate by non-verbal means, or they give up trying. These TL-speaker variables affect communication and learning in all settings - even in classrooms where the TL speaker is the teacher. In classrooms where the language used by the teacher does not work well as input, or in more unstructured situations, as in "open classrooms" or 65

Lily Wong Fillmore on the playground, where students cannot count on getting the free input provided by teachers in instructional activities as described above, the interaction between learners and TL speakers is all-important, and learners play a much greater role in getting the input and support they need for language learning. In such situations, learner variables such as personality and social skills can play a substantial role in language learning. Learners who find it easy or desirable to interact with TL speakers get many more of the social contacts needed for language learning than do learners who are not as interested, or motivated, or who are less able to manage the kind of social contacts needed. Variables such as personality, social style, social competence, motivation, and attitudes in both learners and speakers of the target language can affect language learning, in fact. Conclusion

What I have tried to show in this chapter is how the parts of the model that has been described here figure in the process of language learning, and how variation in the three components can crucially affect the outcome of the process. The attempt to find simple or straightforward explanations both for variation and for language learning has not been particularly fruitful. The processes that figure in language learning can be understood only when all of the components of the model are considered. Similarly, variation in language learning cannot be explained or predicted without a consideration of the complex interaction among the many factors that are involved in language learning. The model that has been discussed here is just a proposal, however. I continue to work on it, and to test it on the language-learning data my colleagues and I have collected over the years.

References Allen, P., M. Swain, B. Harley, & J. Cummins 1990. Aspects of classroom treatment: toward a more comprehensive view of second language education. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain (eds.), The development of second language proficiency. New York: Cambridge University Press. Beebe, L. M. 1983. Risk-taking and the language learner. In H. Seliger & M. Long (eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Bialystok, E. 1983. Some factors in the selection and implementation of communication strategies. In C. Faerch & G. Kasper (eds.), Strategies in interlanguage communication. London: Longman. 1984. Strategies in interlanguage learning and performance. In A. Davies & 66

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C. Criper (eds.), Interlanguage: proceedings of the seminar in honour of Pit Corder. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bialystok, E. & M. Frohlich 1977. Aspects of second language learning in classroom settings. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 13, 2-26. Campbell, R. N. 1984. The immersion approach of foreign language teaching. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books. Clyne, M. 1968. Zum Pidgin-Deutsch der Gastarbeiter. Zeitschrift fur Mundartforschung 35,130-139. (ed.) 1982. Foreigner talk. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 28. Cummins, J. & M. Swain, 1986. Bilingualism and education. Aspects of theory, research and policy. London: Longman. Ellis, R. 1984. Classroom second language development. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Ervin-Tripp, S. 1974. Is second language learning like the first? TESOL Quarterly, 8, 111-127. Faerch, C. & G. Kasper 1980. Processes in foreign language learning and communication. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 5,47-118. 1983. On identifying communication strategies. In C. Faerch & G. Kasper (eds.), Strategies in interlanguage communication. London: Longman. Ferguson, C. A. 1977. Simplified registers, broken language, and Gastarbeiterdeutsch. In C. Molony, H. Zobl, & W. Stolting (eds.), Deutsch im Kontakt mitanderen Sprachen. Kronberg: Scriptor. Gaies, S. 1979. Linguistic input in first and second language learning. In F. Eckman & A. Hastings (eds.), Studies in first and second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gardner, R. C. & W. C. Lambert 1972. Attitudes and motivation in second language learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gass, S. & E. M. Varonis, 1985. Task variation in native/nonnative negotiation of meaning. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Harley, B., P. Allen, J. Cummins, & M. Swain 1987. Final report. The development of bilingual proficiency study. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Hatch, E. 1983. Simplified input and second language acquisition. In R. Andersen (ed.), Pidginization and creolization as language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Klein, W. 1986. Second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, W. & N. Dittmar 1979. Developing grammars. Berlin: Springer. Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S., M. Long, & R. Scarcella 1979. Age, rate and eventual attainment in second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 13, 573-582. 67

Lily Wong Fillmore Lagaretta, D. 1979. The effects of program models on language acquisition by Spanish-speaking children. TESOL Quarterly, 13, 521-534. Lambert, W. E. 1984. Overview of issues in immersion education. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. Lambert, W. E. & G. R. Tucker 1972. Bilingual education of children: the St. Lambert experiment. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Lightbown, P. 1983. Exploring relationships between developmental and instructional sequences in L2 acquisition. In H. Seliger & M. Long (eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Long, M. 1981. Input, interaction, and second language acquisition. In H. Winitz (ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 379, 259-278. 1983. Linguistic and conversational adjustments to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5,177-193. Meisel, J. 1983. Strategies of second language acquisition: more than one kind of simplification. In R. Andersen (ed.), Pidginization and creolization as language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. Stern & A. Todesco 1978. The good language learner. Research in Education (no.7). Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Nelson, K. 1981. Individual differences in language development: implications for development and language. Developmental Psychology, 17, 225-287. Peters, A. M. 1977. Language learning strategies: does the whole equal the sum of the parts? Language, 53, 560-573. 1983. The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Language segmentation: operating principles for the perception and analysis of language. In D.S. Slobin (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. II: Theoretical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pica, T. & C. Doughty 1985. Input and interaction in the communicative language classroom: a comparison of teacher-fronted and group activities. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Rossier, P. 1976. Extroversion-introversion as a significant variable in the learning of oral English as a second language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Southern California. Schumann, J. 1978. Social and psychological processes in second language acquisition. In J. C. Richards (ed.), Understanding second and foreign language learning: issues and approaches. New York: Academic Press. Selinker, L. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209-230. Selinker, L., M. Swain, & G. Dumas 1975. The interlanguage hypothesis extended to children. Language Learning 25,139-152. Snow, C. & M. Hoefnagel-Hohle 1978. Age differences in second language acqui68

Second-language learning in children sition. In E. Hatch (ed.), Second language acquisition: a book of readings. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Snow, M. A., J. Galvan, & R. Campbell, 1980. The pilot class of the Culver City Spanish immersion program: a follow-up report, or whatever happened to the immersion class of 78? In K. Bailey, M. Long, & S. Peck (eds.), Second language acquisition studies. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Strong, M. 1982. Social styles and the second language acquisition of Spanishspeaking kindergartners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley. Swain, M. 1984. A review of immersion education in Canada: research and evaluation studies. In Studies on immersion education: a collection for United States educators. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. 1988. Manipulating and complementing content teaching to maximize second language learning. TESOL Canada Journal, 6, 68-83. Swain, M. & B. Burnaby 1976. Personality characteristics and second language learning in young children: a pilot study. Working Papers on Bilingualismy 11,76-90. Swain, M. & S. Lapkin 1982. Evaluating bilingual education: a Canadian case study Clevedon, Avon, England: Multilingual Matters. Tarone, E. 1981. Some thoughts on the notion of communication strategy. TESOL Quarterly, 15, 285-295. van Lier, L. 1988. The classroom and the language learner. London: Longman. Wong Fillmore, L. 1976. The second time around: cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stanford University. 1979. Individual differences in second language acquisition. In C.J. Fillmore, W. S. Y. Wang & D. K. Kempler (eds.), Individual differences in language ability and language behavior. New York: Academic Press. 1982. Instructional language as linguistic input. In L. C. Wilkinson (ed.), Communicating in the classroom.New York: Academic Press. 1983. The language learner as an individual. In M. Clarke & J. Handscombe (eds.), In TESOL '82. Pacific perspectives on language learning and teaching. Washington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. 1989a. Language learning in social context: the view from research in second language learning. In R. Dietrich & C. Graumann (eds.), Language processing in social context. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers. 1989b. Teachability and second language acquisition. In R. Schiefelbusch & M. Rice (eds.), The teachability of language. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes. Wong Fillmore, L., P. Ammon, B. McLaughlin, & M. S. Ammon 1985. Learning English through bilingual instruction. Final Report to National Institute of Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

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4

Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children JIM CUMMINS

When children begin the acquisition of a second language (L2), whether in the home or at school, their cognitive resources clearly play a central role in the rapidity and ultimate success with which that language is acquired. Other individual factors, such as motivation, and contextual factors that determine amount and type of exposure to the second language, are also central to the acquisition process and in most situations are likely to interact with cognitive factors. I argue in this chapter that the process of second-language acquisition can be clarified by distinguishing between two dimensions of proficiency that relate in specific ways to determinants of the acquisition process, namely, attribute-based and input-based aspects of proficiency. Attribute-based aspects of proficiency refer to those dimensions of proficiency whose acquisition is strongly influenced by relatively stable attributes of the individual learner, for example, cognitive and personality variables. Input-based aspects of proficiency, on the other hand, are considerably less related to stable attributes of the individual than they are to the quality and quantity of L2 input received from the environment. In the initial stages of acquiring the L2 the distinction between attribute- and input-based dimensions of proficiency may not be apparent but, over time, the distinctive influences of attributes and input will result in differentiation between these dimensions. The chapter focuses in particular on the role of one aspect of the cognitive resources that children bring to L2 acquisition, namely, their first-language (LI) proficiency. The purpose is to elucidate the extent to which different aspects of LI and L2 proficiency are related in the L2 acquisition process. An initial step in this analysis is to clarify the dimensions of proficiency in one language. Dimensions of language proficiency

A number of investigators have pointed to a distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language as fundamental to understanding the nature of children's language and literacy development. The terms used 70

First- and second-language proficiency by different investigators have varied but the essential distinction refers to the extent to which the meaning being communicated is supported by contextual cues (such as the paralinguistic cues present in face-to-face interaction) or dependent largely on linguistic cues that are independent of the immediate communicative context. Among the distinctions that have been made are Bruner's (1975) distinction between communicative and analytic competence, Olson's (1977) utterance and text, Donaldson's (1978) embedded and disembedded thought and language, Bereiter and Scardamalia's (1981) conversation and composition, Cummins' (1981, 1984) contextembedded and context-reduced language proficiency (recently labeled simply as conversational- vs. academic-language proficiency; e.g., Cummins, 1989), and Snow et al.'s (this volume) contextualized and decontextualized use of language. Snow's terminology will be adopted in the present chapter. The distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language skills is consistent with the research of Biber (1986), who used psychometric analysis of an extremely large corpus of spoken and written textual material in order to uncover the basic dimensions underlying textual variation. Three major dimensions were labeled by Biber as interactive vs edited text, abstract vs situated content, and reported vs immediate style. The first dimension is described as follows: Thus, Factor 1 identifies a dimension which characterizes text produced under conditions of high personal involvement and real-time constraints (marked by low explicitness in the expression of meaning, high subordination and interactive features) - as opposed to texts produced under conditions permitting considerable editing and high explicitness of lexical content, but little interaction or personal involvement. (Biber, 1986, p. 385) The second factor reflects a ''detached formal style vs. a concrete colloquial one" (p. 396). Although this factor is correlated with the first factor, it can be empirically distinguished from it, as illustrated by professional letters, which, according to Biber's analysis, illustrate highly abstract texts with a high level of personal involvement. The third dimension "distinguishes texts with a primary narrative emphasis, marked by considerable reference to a removed situation, from those with non-narrative emphases (descriptive, expository, or other) marked by little reference to a removed situation but a high occurrence of present tense forms" (Biber, 1986, p. 396). Although Biber's three dimensions provide a more detailed analysis of the nature of language proficiency and use than the contextualized/decontextualized distinction (as would be expected in view of the very extensive range of spoken and written texts analyzed), it is clear that the distinctions highlighted in his dimensions are consistent with those distinguishing contextualized and decontextualized language. The narrower range of language 71

Jim Cummins used and/or required by developing children makes the contextualized/ decontextualized distinction adequate for purposes of this chapter. There is considerable empirical evidence for this distinction in the sphere of second-language acquisition. Several investigators (Collier, 1987; Cummins, 1981; Cummins & Nakajima, 1987) have reported that at least four years is required even for socioeconomically advantaged immigrant students to attain grade norms in English academic skills. Peer-appropriate conversational L2 skills are usually attained within a considerably shorter period (on average about two years of exposure to the L2 in the L2 context) (Cummins, 1984; Gonzalez, 1986; Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978). Both Snow etal. (this volume) and Gonzalez (1986) have reported that contextualized and decontextualized language skills are relatively independent of each other among bilingual students. In summary, the distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language use has been drawn by a considerable number of investigators and is supported empirically in a substantial number of studies. To what extent are each of these dimensions related across languages? In other words, to what extent is there evidence that students who manifest high levels of contextualized and decontextualized skills in their LI will develop similarly high levels of these skills in their L2? The relation between LI and L2 proficiency

Investigations of the relationships between LI and L2 contextualized and decontextualized language skills among immigrant students will be reviewed according to the background of the students involved. The three major categories are Finnish students in Sweden, Hispanic students in the United States, and Asian students in the United States and Canada. Then some additional evidence from bilingual programs involving both majority and minority students will be reviewed and finally we will examine studies involving adult L2 learners. Studies of immigrant students Finnish minority students in Sweden Two sets of studies involving Finnishbackground students in Sweden are relevant; the first set consists of studies carried out in the early 1970s synthesized by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976), while the second consists of more recent studies reported by Linde and Lofgren (1988). In reviewing these studies our purpose is to assess the extent to which students' acquisition of Swedish (L2) academic skills is related to their Finnish (LI) proficiency. In some studies, data are also reported on the relationships between contextualized (conver72

First- and second-language proficiency sational) and decontextualized (academic) language skills and these data will also be reviewed. The Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa report The studies synthesized by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) were carried out primarily in Olofstrom and Gothenburg and were designed to determine the level of Finnish immigrant students' academic achievement in both Finnish and Swedish and to explore some of the determinants of their achievement. A variety of tests in both languages were used; most assessed cognitive and academic abilities such as vocabulary knowledge, synonyms, antonyms, etc. as well as academic achievement in reading, math, and other school subjects. Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa summarize the Olofstrom data as follows: those who attended school in Finland (prior to immigration) approached the level of achievement of normal Swedish pupils . . . in the written comprehension test considerably more often than those who began school in Sweden. Those who attended school in Finland for at least three years did best. The explanation for this can perhaps be found in their better skills in their mother tongue, which laid the basis for understanding a test written in Swedish. Two years in a Finnish class in Sweden did not, on the other hand, make for as good a basis for learning Swedish as the corresponding time in Finland. (1976, pp. 65-66)

Significant correlations were observed for both the Olofstrom and Gothenburg samples between Finnish and Swedish verbal academic proficiency. For example, among the Olofstrom sample, the partial correlations (with length of residence held constant) between Finnish and Swedish for grades three to six students (N= 165) ranged from 0.20 (p