Year: 2003
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: A number of recent developments in the research on bilingualism and visual word recognition have convinced me that the time is ripe to integrate both topics.As many of the developments were due to the use of the masked priming paradigm, the present book may indeed be the ideal outlet to summarise the main findings in these research areas and to discuss some of the ongoing integration work.First, I will review a number of recent trends in the research on bilingualism, then I will talk about the issue of phonological coding in visual word recognition, and finally I will discuss a few studies that examined the possibility of cross-fertilisation.The advantage of a book chapter is that one can be more outspoken than in a journal article, where one never knows who the reviewers will be and the review process itself usually ends in a much more toneddown version of the original submission.Unfortunately, "more outspoken" is rarely a synonym for "more correct" (which is why journal editors and reviewers rightly ask for all necessary qualifications and reservations).However, it makes clearer what an author really thinks at a certain moment in time, even though it entails the risk that the same author at some later point may be forced to backtrack and to acknowledge that he had it completely wrong after all.As such, the present chapter is better considered as a workshop talk (on which it is based) than as a balanced review of the literature. Changing views about bilingualismTwo recent insights in the research on bilingualism are likely to put the issue of multiple language proficiency in the centre of written word recognition for the coming years.The first is that a bilingual person is not equipped with two independent visual word recognition systems.That is, a bilingual cannot be thought of as the equivalent of two monolingual word recognisers living within the same person.There are influences from the first language (L1) on word recognition in the second language (L2), but also from L2 on word recognition in L1, making an English-Dutch bilingual different from an English monolingual, even in the identification of English words.The second insight is that bilinguals are not a minority, so that a model of visual word processing that cannot account for second language processing is not a good model. Bilinguals differ from monolinguals also in the processing of L1Up to the late 1980s, the dominant view about word recognition in bilinguals was that bilinguals could control which part of their language processing brain was active.They were believed to have two separate lexicons that could be switched on and off by means of a selective access control mechanism (e.g.MacNamara & Kushnir, 1971;Scarborough, Gerard, & Cortese, 1984).Such an architecture of language selective access seemed ideal to explain why in general bilinguals do not experience interference 1
Author: Marc Brysbaert
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W202494417