With the rich history of territorial conquest on the island of Malta, each regime has left its mark on the small archipelago, especially with each linguistic conquest, a new language was formed, influenced and fortified to what we know now as Maltese. Within this thesis we will identify the factors of these regimes which have led Malta to become a bilingual nation. This thesis investigates the Maltese language situation along with the status of the social and individual characteristics the theories of bilingualism adhere. In order to address how Malta has become a functional bilingual society, theoretical measures of both societal and individual bilingualism will be explored. The thesis applies research methodology with special participation of University students and staff from the University of Malta. Together they help bring insight in answering just how Maltese and English are encouraged in the Maltese social strata. It shows just how it is maintained individually by understanding the environmental mechanisms put in place by the Maltese government as well as how it is encouraged at home. Furthermore, it explains how the policies help the languages continue to coexist and form a functional bilingual society.

Researchers are increasingly drawn to the study of societal bilingualism (or multilingualism), which is the study of the specific nature of bilingualism practiced by a nation, state, province or territory. Such studies seek to identify the institutions and legal frameworks put in place to regulate and reproduce bilingualism, as well as to understand groups which practice bilingualism. Drawing on a descriptive approach that flows from a sociological model of critical theory and conflict theory, this study is based on societal bilingualism in Cameroon, the only other country in the world, apart from Canada, that has both English and French as its only official languages. Cameroon is also one of the few African countries that do not have a local language as an official language. Acknowledging the central role of texts and their analysis in understanding social practices, this case study is carried out using critical document analysis to examine previous research, mass media products, government reports, historical data and information, laws, orders, press releases and speeches to uncover the precise nature of official language bilingualism in Cameroon. The study offers insights into the relevant historical and language background against which a critical discussion on official language bilingualism and an analysis of the legal frameworks and institutions set up to regulate and reproduce this bilingualism can be carried out. Attention is given to translation policies and to the most recent measures taken to foster State bilingualism in Cameroon. Indeed, official language bilingualism has been heavily predicated on translation, its institutions and legal framework. This timely case study traces the nation’s failure, as witnessed by the current situation of unrest, to successfully implement, mainly through translation, an official language bilingualism policy that grants equal status to English and French across the national territory. This research concludes that an alternative solution would be to introduce bilingual education as well, particularly from the nursery and elementary school levels, given that, for a long time now, Cameroon has had early simultaneous bilinguals who speak both English and French before they attain school age. A brief comparison between the context of official language bilingualism within the educational system in Cameroon and in Canada highlights the fact that Cameroon has the potential to establish one of the strongest forms of bilingual education in the world.

This study reports on language contact phenomena among the Italian-Venetian communities of Anglophone Canada. The analysis perspective is twofold: on one hand it studies language maintenance/attrition comparing two cohorts of migrants, those already well researched who migrated during the period of mass migration (1945-1967) and those who did so in the following four decades (1970-2009). On the other, it investigates language maintenance/attrition taking an intergenerational perspective on three generations of speakers. The corpus used in the analysis is composed of 56 interviews, collected during three months of fieldwork in Canada in 2009. These data were supplemented by 99 questionnaires, which set the background of the analysis, discussing in particular the linguistic habits and attitudes of the community investigated. Given the huge amount of data considered and the mainly quantitative approach taken in this research, two statistical software programs, Taltac and SPSS, were employed to help with the analysis. Another tool, meta-linguistic observation, is also used to broaden the general framework of the study and whenever possible support it with more evidence. The literature on language maintenance/attrition among Italian migrant communities is sizeable; however, there remains room for further investigations. This work, in particular, addresses two major aspects still rarely explored: first, quantifying the decline in heritage language skills on a generational scale, and secondly, comparing the linguistic skills of post-Second World War migrants, on which research has mostly concentrated so far, with those of new waves of migrants. Although this thesis is concerned with a particular geographical and historical framework and the findings are therefore representative of this specific context, the work aims to point to some observations from which generalisation may be possible. By setting side by side these two very distinct cohorts and discussing the new linguistic tendencies in language proficiency among the most recent groups of migrants, research is opened to the new scenarios evolving among Italian communities abroad.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 B58 / Master of Science

Bilinguals have repeatedly shown to have better results than monolinguals in non-verbal cognitive tasks that require inhibition of distracting stimuli. Evidence suggests that this enhanced performance is due to training effects of non domain specific executive functions, and that this gain in cognitive performance can contribute to a cognitive reserve in old age. One of the most frequently used methods when studying the relationship between second language proficiency and cognitive abilities is the Simon task in the visual sensory modality. The present study aimed to determine if the advantage found in the visual Simon task also could apply to a tactile Simon task. The sample consisted of 40 individuals aged 43 to 64 with different levels in their second language. An operational span test (OSPAN) was used to control for working memory capacity. No significant correlation was found between bilingualism and the Simon effect in either modality. Since the study has low statistical power and a small range in second language proficiency, it was concluded that further research investigating whether the bilingual advantage found in the visual Simon task can be found across modalities is necessary before any conclusions regarding a relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control can be made.

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This study compares the performance of unilingual normal, unilingual learning-disabled, bilingual normal, and bilingual learning-disabled groups of children from 8 to 11 years of age on acquisition of word meaning tasks. The tasks were derived from the Re-cognition Function Level of Kass's theory. Initial subject selection involved using teacher judgments and an examination of school files to determine the presence of learning disability. Bilingual linguistic background was determined by teacher and parental judgments and by ability in verbal conversation to achieve a criterion of approximate equivalence between English and Spanish. Four groups of at least 15 subjects each were established, reflecting linguistic background (unilingual, bilingual) and presence of learning disability (learning-disabled, normal). Final assignment of subjects to learning-disabled and normal groups was verified by the administration of four tests and a discriminant analysis of the results. Five experimental tasks involving the acquisition of word meaning were devised and administered to the subjects. These tasks were: Task 1, Word Classification; Task 2, Word Class Labeling; Task 3, Verbal Analogies; Task 4, Synonyms and Antonyms; and Task 5, Creative Language. Task 5, Creative Language, consisted of Parts A (written) and Part B (verbal). An Abstract-Concrete Scale score and a Words per Sentence score resulted from both Part A and Part B. The results of the study were as follows: (1) Learning-disabled subjects, regardless of linguistic grouping, scored significantly lower than normal subjects on the Word Classification, Word Class Labeling, Verbal Analogies, and Synonyms and Antonyms tasks. They also scored significantly lower than normal subjects on the Creative Language Task Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Abstract-Concrete Scale. No difference was present on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Words per Sentence. (2) Bilingual subjects, regardless of the presence of learning disability, scored significantly lower than unilingual subjects on the Word Class Labeling and Verbal Analogies tasks. They scored significantly higher than unilingual subjects on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written), Words per Sentence. (3) Younger subjects scored significantly lower than older subjects on the Word Classification and Verbal Analogies tasks and on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Abstract-Concrete Scale. (4) No significant interaction effect (presence of learning disability x linguistic background) was obtained on any of the tasks. The results of this study support these conclusions. First, children labeled as learning disabled have skill deficits in acquiring word meaning, with the qualification that measures of the quantity of language production do not consistently correspond to measures of the quality of language production. Second, bilingual children may appear to display deficits in the acquisition of word meaning if task selection in the secondary language (English) does not take practice factors into account. However, bilingual learning-disabled children display these deficits in both primary and secondary languages. Third, skill in the acquisition of word meaning improves across the age span of 8 to 11 years regardless of the presence of learning disability.

The purpose of the present study was to compare the oral reading miscues and reading comprehension in two groups of young adult Spanish-English bilinguals. Based on current language use, we characterized participants as either “active bilinguals” (using Spanish at least 20% of the time) or “inactive bilinguals (using Spanish less than 20% of the time). Information gained in the present study demonstrated that English-dominant young adult bilinguals produced more oral reading miscues in Spanish than in English, regardless of current language use. Results also demonstrated that increased rate of miscues in Spanish did not negatively affect reading comprehension. / text

Natural language enables speakers to organize and highlight the information they want to convey. The linguistic analysis of this organization, known as Information Structure (Lambrecht, 1994), investigates the different strategies used in various languages to mark important information, such as focus constituents, within larger utterances. Research on K'ichee' has predominantly documented the syntactic strategies used to mark constituents for focus and has yet to analyze the role of intonation (Can Pixabaj & England, 2011). While the use of intonation in focus marking in different varieties of Spanish has received more attention than in K'ichee', the consideration of its role within bilingual contexts is under documented (O'Rourke, 2005; Simonet, 2008). This dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature by analyzing the intonational contours associated with contrastive focus constituents in both languages of Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals and comparing these contours cross-linguistically. These analyses investigate different suprasegmental features of contrastive focus within different syntactic structures and their correlation with the individual level of language dominance of each bilingual. This study provides evidence that these bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in both languages in similar ways. The first significant finding is that an earlier alignment of the intonational events, and not a greater pitch span, is the most consistently used strategy in both languages. Additionally, while a greater pitch span is not consistently used to mark contrastive focus, it is the only suprasegmental feature that is correlated with bilingual language dominance in both Spanish and K'ichee'. Finally, while some dialect-specific phonological features provide evidence of transfer between the two languages, the features that are the most similar in both languages and possibly the most prone to convergence are the same that are consistently used to mark contrastive focus, i.e., the alignment of intonational events. The present study contributes to the ongoing analyses of Information Structure, intonation, and bilingualism, and it is proposed that frameworks such as the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1980), Accomodation Theory (Giles & Powesland, 1975), and the Effort Code (Gussenhoven, 2004) can be extended to these findings on the role of the location of intonational events in both prosodic contrastive focus marking and convergence of intonational systems of bilinguals. / text