Bilingualism and Cognition

Having discussed many points about the way society views bilingualism and how societies are bilingual, we now have to move on to thinking about the individual.  Just as we can see that there great variation in the type of bilingualism in society, almost every combination of language and period of learning exists when the bilingualism is in the individual.  People learn languages in the home and depending on the attitudes and background of the parents, they will learn one or two or even more languages.  What is surprising is that they do so easily, without great stress.  Very few children have to be taught language - they acquire it by interacting with other people.

We have some ideas about how this works when we are dealing with one language.  There is a period when language and cognition develop alongside one another.  This means that the child is learning about the world, about how objects work and how events happen at he same time that words are being acquired.  In the beginning stages, it seems as if the child speaks all his or her thoughts.  All of language is outward.  Then gradually the child begins to internalise the language.  In this way, according to Vygotsky, a famous Russian psychologist, who has had a great influence, the inner speech becomes inner thought. 

The issue for bilingualism is what effect the use of two languages has on the person internally.  Do people store the languages separately somewhere?  How do they know which word to retrieve when they are naming objects?  Do they think in different languages for different situations?

You should read Grosjean’s book if you want to follow up on this and also Baker’s chapters 7 and 8 which we will deal with now.  In this session we will aim to cover some of the cognitive aspects of bilingualism and then focus on the current question of whether Deaf children are bilingual.

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This page was last modified January 29, 2007
jim.kyle@bris.ac.uk