Not through a glass darkly: refocusing the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism through a bivocal lens Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • Cambridge University Press 2016. [T]he abstraction [by Chomsky] to a monolingual speaker is of a different kind from assuming that all speakers in a community are effectively the same; it is simplifying the average mind rather than finding an average mind, so to speak. If most human beings are in fact multi-competent, monocompetence is a misleading representation of the human species rather than a convenient idealization. (Cook 1991, p. 114) Introduction In his preface to the 1992 edited volume Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals, Richard Harris noted that bilingualism is barely mentioned in most cognitive psychology texts, and that, for the most part (Paivio and Begg 1981; Taylor and Taylor 1990), even psycholinguistic texts treat bilingualism only very lightly, if at all (Harris 1992, p. 9). This observation still stands. With few exceptions (e.g. Paivio and Begg 1981; Taylor and Taylor 1990; Fernandez and Cairns 2010), psycholinguistic textbooks give scant attention to the topic; for example, in Introducing Psycholinguistics, the word bilingualism is not given its own entry and there is only a single reference to second language processing in the books index (Warren 2013). Where bilingualism is brought up in psychology of language textbooks, it typically figures either as a subtopic in language acquisition (e.g. Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner 2012), or in the context of a discussion of the relationship between language and thought (e.g. Carroll 2008). The somewhat neglected status of bilingualism within cognitive psychology may in part reflect a prevailing belief among psychologists that human cognitive abilities in healthy adults are universal and unvarying. The primary contexts in which individual differences in cognition have been studied involve comparisons of healthy individuals with clinically impaired ones or differences related to aging. The relative lack of interest in bilingualism (until recently) may also, and perhaps largely, reflect an implicit monolingual focus of psycholinguistics from the time of its founding. This focus may have been bolstered by an unconscious bias on the part of early researchers (many of whom were themselves monolingual) towards a language model that fits their own reality and their negative perceptions of bilinguality (Pavlenko 2002). Whatever the reasons, the continued persistence of a monolingual-as-norm framework within cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics is all the more curious given the inescapable fact that the majority of language users are bilingual or multilingual rather than single language users.

author list (cited authors)

  • Vaid, J., & Meuter, R.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Vaid, Jyotsna||Meuter, Renata

Book Title

  • The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence

publication date

  • March 2016