Bilingualism:The Sociopragmatic-

Psycholinguistic Interface

Joel Walters Bar-Ilam University

Camera ready copy for this book was provided by the author.

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walters, Joel. Bilinguailsm: the sociopragmatic-psycholinguistic interface / Joel Walters, p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8058-4956-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8058-5269-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Bilinguilism. I. Title. P115. W35 2004 306.44′6—dc22 2004050606

CIP

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acidfree paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.

Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface vii 1 Bilingual Phenomena 1

From Psycholinguistics to Social Cognition: Toward a Cognitive Sociolinguistics 1 Situating Bilingualism: Constraints, Borders and Limits 3 Between Mind and Method: The Cognitive Prism of Bilingualism 5 The SPPL Model and its Processing Claims 11 Bilingual Phenomena and Phenomena in Bilingualism 16 Four Arguments for Another Model of Bilingual Processing 25 Chapter Coda 29

2 Ten Perspectives on Bilingualism 31 Intellectual Roots: A Purposeful and Selective Outline 32 Squeezing Processing Out of Structure: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 33 Ethnographies of Bilingualism: Multiple Levels and Rich Interpretation 48 Psychological, Task-Based Approaches to Bilingual Production 61 Two More Views on Bilingual Production: Poulisse and De Bot 76 Monolingual Models for Bilingual Clones: Caramazza and Levelt 77 Accounting for Incompleteness, Dysfluency, and Codeswitching in Bilingualism 81 Summary and Synthesis: From Consensus to Some Controversy 86

3 A Functional Architecture of Bilingualism 92 Sociopragmatic Information in a Model of Bilingual Processing 92 Assumptions Behind the SPPL Model 95 Information Modules: Availability and Activation 97 Information Components in Bilingual Production 113 Chapter Summary 145

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4 Four Processing Mechanisms in Bilingual Production 149 Basic Level Processes and General Processing Mechanisms

150

Walking Through the SPPL Processing Schemata

151

Sequential Processing in Bilingual Production

167

Alternative Approaches in Processing

169

Imitation, Repetition and Mimesis

170

Variation, Variance, and Other Close Cousins

177

Integration Processes in Bilingualism

184

Four Notions of Control

189

Chapter Summary

196

5 Accounting for Bilingual Phenomena with the SPPL Model 199 Codeswitching and Interference in SPPL

199

Interpretation and Translation 209

Bilingual 220

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Aspects of Computation and Cursing Methodological Perspectives on the Investigation of Bilingualism

226

Chapter Summary

235

6 Acquisition, Attrition, and Language Disturbances in Bilingualism 238 Acquisition, in Bilingualism

239

Investigating Bilingual Loss and Attrition

247

Bilingualism and Language Disturbances

254

A Concluding Statement

271

References 279 Author Index 306 Subject Index 312

Preface

Until recently, bilingualism was not an independent field of inquiry but was subsumed within other disciplinary studies. In sociology and anthropology, it was a tool for grouping differences and examining cultural uniqueness; in experimental psychology, it was a way to test the latest theory or hypothesis in memory; and, even in linguistics, the study of bilingualism was the exception to the rule in an academic field that promoted universals and ideal types. Today, the monolingual bias is fading, and bilingual inquiry is maturing as a science which needs an account of both its sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic parameters.

The present volume is a first attempt to do some of this interdisciplinary bridgework. The book grew out of the belief that language and linguistic research is the place to summon anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists of all persuasions in a joint communicative effort. As a preview to the book's lack of orthodoxy, the following is a quotation from the last chapter:

The distinctions pursued throughout, between structure and processing, between acquisition and use, and between sociopragmatics and psycholinguistics, have been aimed to contribute to a particular view of language. In that view, linguistic structure can never be more than a window to processing. Acquisition cannot be studied without a deep understanding of language use. And psycholinguistic processing is lifeless without sociopragmatic grounding.

In the ideal, the book will bring sociopragmatic aspects of bilingualism in from the field to the experimental labs of cognitive science, exposing the mental processes that lie beneath the social structures and functions of bilingualism. To get at the complex, somewhat elusive, interaction between structure and processing, I propose the Sociopragmatic-Psycholinguistic (SPPL) Model. It is hoped that this model will stimulate debate and research about some of the unstated claims and methods on the field sites and in the laboratories of bilingualism

The book is structured as follows:

Chapter 1 asserts the uniqueness of bilingualism. It focuses on three phenomena to support this claim - codeswitching, fluency, and translation - and draws related support from bilingual behavior in counting/computing, cursing, and other areas of affect. The chapter situates the inter-disciplinary study of bilingualism as cutting across research in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics but as distinct from more purely linguistic work in second language acquisition and cross-linguistic studies. The main elements of the

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