General Issues in Bilingualism
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
General issues in bilingualism and second language acquisition
Who is bilingual?

A bilingual knows two languages

A bilingual speaks two languages

A bilingual is native or near-native in two languages
How does one become bilingual?

Immigrants

Indigenous minorities

Bidialectal populations

Privileged populations (e.g. Anglophones in Canadian French immersion programs,
Israelis who have returned from extended stays in North America)

By parental choice
Is it a homogeneous group?

Age of acquisition

Birth order and family size

Order of L1/L2 acquisition (simultaneous/ sequential)

Acquisition context (e.g. one parent for each language/L1 at home and L2 at school).
Two systems or one?
“Under what conditions are the two languages of a bilingual child differentiated?” (e.g.
Genesee, 2001; Muller & Hulk, 2000).


Differentiated -language system hypothesis -The language systems are
differentiated right from the beginning
Unitary -language systems hypothesis - The language systems are no differentiated
right from the beginning - the child does not have resources to do it.
Volterra and Taeschner (1977) - three stages
Diary studies of simultaneous bilinguals (one parent - one language)

Words from both languages are included without differentiation
- Children mixed words from both languages
General Issues in Bilingualism
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
- A word in one language almost never had a corresponding word with the same


meaning in the other language
The two lexicons are differentiated but not the syntax (~ 2)
- Two different words pertaining to the two languages describe the same event or
object
- The pragmatic context influenced the choice of words
There are two linguistic codes distinguished in lexicon and in syntax (~3)
- Both languages are used correctly at the lexical and the syntactic levels
Lindholm and padilla (1977)
Language samples (2;10 and 6;2) - one experimenter/one language
Two separate linguistic systems from an early age. Mixing (2% of utterances) mostly
occurs at the lexical level - substitutions of nouns. Mixing is due to lexical gaps or
familiarity
Genesee (1989) - “bilingual children’s mixed utterances are modeled on mixed input
produced by others” (p. 169).
Lanza (1992) - Longitudinal study - there is a great impact of language input, the context
of the conversation, and parental strategies toward child language mixing, dominance.
Mixing per se is not enough in order to determine that the child does not differentiate his
two languages
Quay (1995) - Longitudinal study - by 1;10 - 0ver 50 pairs.
The role of Universal Grammar (UG) in L2A - Transfer vs. Access.

Full Transfer/No Access - No aspect of UG, not instantiated in the native
language (L1), is available to the learner (cf. Bley-Vroman 1989, Clahsen 1988).
Thus the learner has to rely only on her knowledge of L1 and on some learning
strategies.
Since UG is not available to the learner, similarities to first language acquisition
will be viewed as artifacts that might reflect the influence of L1, rather than
evidence for access to UG.

No Transfer/Full Access (e.g., Ritchie, 1978; Felix, 1988, Epstein, Flynn &
Martohardjono 1996) - UG in full constrains Second Language Acquisition. L1
does not affect L2; there is no transfer of any principles, parameters, or rules from
L1 to L2.
These assumptions entail a similar course of acquisition for L1 and L2.
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General Issues in Bilingualism
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem

Full Transfer/Full Access (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse 1996) - The process starts
with transfer from L1 parameters and values to L2, but the correction by the L2
learner is made by parameter resetting which is constrained by UG.
The duality of FT/FA predicts that the development of the grammar in L2 follows
a similar path to the one seen in the development of L1. Any divergence from this
path is attributed to the L1 influence.

Partial Transfer/Full Access (e.g. Eubank 1994) - L1 structure is available to L2
learners with underspecified slots, i.e. with no features. L1 structure is the
baseline, but UG is accessed in order to specify the slots and set the features to the
L2 values.
Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994; 1996) - the Minimal Trees hypothesis.
These hypotheses were made for adult learners. Does it matter? Are children
different? Is there a critical period for access to UG?
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