Do you or your child mix up languages in a sentence, in a context, or in an environment? Good news! That is nothing bad. That’s what researchers claim. It’s a very natural behavior for bilingual speakers. Individuals who are code-switching should not be seen as individuals who use poor language. They should be seen as individuals whose brain is able to process information naturally without slowing down.
Even more, learning a second language triggers new connections in the brain.
Look at these three interactional contexts. I am sure it looks familiar to you.
- One language is spoken in one environment, and the second language is spoken e.g. just at work
- Switching between languages occurs in a conversation, but not in an utterance.
- Adapting words from one language in the context of the other
I do all of these interactions depending on the individuals I am talking to. As long as I know that I am understood, I simply use the words that come first into my mind. My favorite is Number 3 😊
What about you? Do you talk to your child in one language and your child answers in another? Researchers say that is good! There is nothing wrong with continuing to learn the language.
Please have a look at the extracts of the four articles below:
“One of the biggest takeaways is that bilingual behavior should not be viewed as deviant or bad because they do not resemble monolingual behavior.
That said, I think this project serves as a starting point for understanding typical bilingual behaviors so that bilinguals are not misperceived as poor language users or, even worse, misdiagnosed for having a language processing deficit.”
Sarah F. Phillips is currently a Linguistics Ph.D. Student at New York University. Her work focuses primarily on bilingual language processing and bilingual language development, using both neuroimaging and behavioral methods.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211130/Brains-are-Naturally-Wired-to-be-Bilingual.aspx
“Could code switching relate to possible memory and attention benefits?
One recent idea about improved cognitive functioning, which comes from work by researchers such as Judith Kroll at the University of California, Irvine, is that social aspects of language switching—such as deciding when and how you switch—could help explain potential benefits. Let’s say you have a Spanish-English bilingual person talking to another Spanish-English bilingual person. Well, that is actually the easiest mode of conversation for them both because they can use whatever words work in whatever ways they want to put those words together to convey thoughts and ideas that they have, right?”
“What’s actually hard is when you’re in a situation where you have to stick with just one language. Let’s say, as a Spanish-English bilingual person, you’re in conversation with someone who only speaks English or Spanish. In one hypothesis, […] the bilingual individual has to work really, really hard to make this conscious effort to suppress a language to communicate effectively with one monolingual person versus another fellow bilingual person.”
“Current ideas about the bilingual brain suggest that both languages are always accessible, even when the bilingual person is speaking with a monolingual person. So in specific social contexts, bilingual people have to further develop their working memory and attention skills to prevent switching to the language that the monolingual speaker would not understand.”
“In other words, the brain activity looks a lot like what occurs in people who speak just one language. What does that tell us about code switching? The fact that the left anterior temporal lobe is able to combine these concepts in meaningful ways without slowing down, without being affected by where these concepts are coming from or how they’re being presented to us, tells us that our brains are able to do this kind of process naturally, and so we shouldn’t shy away from it.”
“One of the things that I want people to know and understand is that code switching is very natural for bilingual people. Asking us to maintain a single language is harder. I think that while most bilingual individuals have a negative attitude toward code switching—they think it’s bad or that we should stick to one language—it’s not actually bad for our brain. I think that it’s important to recognize that just because something doesn’t look like monolingual behavior doesn’t mean it’s deviant.”
Daisy Yuhas edits the Scientific American column Mind Matters. She is a freelance science journalist and editor based in Austin,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-brains-seamlessly-switch-between-languages/
“Learning a second language sparks new connections in the brain that are stored as cognitive reserve.”
Shauna McGinn: Laurier professor studies how language lights up our brains
Three interactional contexts
“We consider three interactional contexts (three different recurrent patterns of conversational exchange) as a way to contrast demands on control processes. We use these contexts, rather than more specialized contexts (e.g., simultaneous translation, air-traffic control) because these contexts reflect the everyday conversational use of language.
- A single-language context in which one language is used in one environment and the other in a second distinct environment. For example, a nonnative language may be spoken exclusively in the work environment with colleagues, whereas the native language is used exclusively with family members at home. In such a context there is no frequent switching between languages;
- A dual-language context in which both languages are used but typically with different speakers. Switching between languages may occur within a conversation but not within an utterance.
- A dense code-switching context in which speakers routinely interleave their languages in the course of a single utterance and adapt words from one of their languages in the context of the other. For example, in French-Alsatian code-switched speech, a speaker may adapt French verbs through the addition of a German particle (-ieren) as in “choisieren” from the French “choisir” rather than switch to the German word for chose, “wählen” (Edwards & Gardner-Chloros, 2007). In English-Tagalog code-switched speech too there is morphosyntactic adaptation as in: “Wala akong cash pang grocery ngayon, if you want, bukas na lang, ipagdadrive pa kita! [English translation: I do not have cash for grocery today, if you want, tomorrow, I will even drive you there!]. The phrase “ipagdadrive” [I will even drive] is a code-switched stretch of speech comprising a personal pronoun, auxiliary, modifier, and verb.”
David W. Green (Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, London, UK) and Jubin Abutalebi Faculty of Psychology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy and Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4095950/
