Culture, education and of other forms of acquired capacities act on individual differences in skill to shape how individuals perform cognitive tasks such as attentional and executive control. Of interest, the use of more than one language (bilingualism) also appears to be a factor that shapes individual performance on tests of cognitive functioning. Indeed, researchers have shown that a bilingual can have better attention and executive control capacities than monolingual speakers and this is argued to be due the ability to inhibit one language while using another. Beyond behavioral differences, bilingualism seems to affect brain structure as well. Recent evidence also shows bilinguals develop more gray matter in crucial brain areas responsible for executive control, hence, providing a neurological basis for why bilinguals outperform monolinguals on many attentional control tasks. It has been postulated that this cognitive advantage offers protection to bilinguals against cognitive decline in aging. Bilingualism affords a cognitive reserve in the form of a set of skills that allows some people to cope with cognitive decline such as mild cognitive decline or Alzheimer's disease better than others. The primary aim of the studies here performed was to investigate if and how the bilingual brain becomes more resistant to cognitive decline. Three combined comparative behavioral and structural neuroimaging studies were carried out in bilingual and monolingual seniors. The overall results show a rather interesting pattern of findings that may be summarized as follows: if well matched for demographic and behavioral variables such as age, socio-economic status, education, and global cognitive functioning, bilinguals have generally increased gray matter densities as compared to monolinguals in those brain areas that are known to be more affected by physiological aging such as the orbitofrontal cortex, the temporal poles and parietal lobules, and in areas involved in cognitive control such as the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Increased gray matter in these latter areas also correlates with the superior performance of bilinguals on executive control tasks. Interestingly, in order to keep such a neural benefit (i.e. increased gray matter density) the degree of proficiency of the second language has to be relatively high and bilinguals have to be constantly exposed to their second language. Finally, specifically for the aging population, age of second language acquisition has no major role in determining putative neural differences. Any putative neural differences between bilingual speakers are determined by factors such as the degree of proficiency and exposure to a second language. In conclusion, as thoroughly investigated here, bilingualism represents a neural reserve for healthy aging. However, the benefits are most prominent when second language proficiency and exposure are kept high. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study explores the policies and requirements governing French immersion teacher certification at the secondary level as prescribed by the Ministry of Education and the universities in each of Canada's ten provinces. Four components are examined: (1) certification procedures, (2) professional training, (3) course credit and competency requirements, and (4) provisions for certified teachers. An analysis of responses to a mailed questionnaire revealed that: (1) Quebec and Ontario are the only two provinces that have specific requirements for FSL certification, (2) there is little agreement among respondents regarding existing reciprocity agreements, (3) there is little consistency in the FSL components of teacher-training programs across Canada, (4) the approved program approach is the most common procedure used for certification, (5) all proposed changes address the need to separate French Immersion training programs from the generic FSL education, (6) none of the provinces currently offer a bonafide Bilingual Education training program, (7) no additional teacher-training is presently required to certify an Anglophone for FSL teaching, and (8) the responsibility of defining the criteria for the selection of FSL teachers is at times assumed by a school board, a denominational education committee, a university, a Ministry of Education, or by supply and demand. Three recommendations were made to the Council of Ministers of Canada: (1) that national assessment centers be established to determine competencies of FSL teacher candidates; (2) that three specific bases of information be established: (a) a national pool of competency-based and criterion referenced performance items, (b) a clearinghouse to assist in evaluating assessment procedures, (c) four regional information exchanges; (3) that research be conducted to determine the feasibility and effective methods of utilizing French native speakers in FSL teaching.

Codeswitching between languages is a uniquely bilingual mode of communication. The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance the current body of knowledge dealing with the phenomenon by analysing samples of speech produced by twenty-six Spanish/English bilingual children ranging in age from eight to twelve. Methods of analysis include theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and educational linguistics. A discussion of relevant codeswitching research covering the past thirty years is presented. The data were collected during a reading study focusing on miscue analysis. The children read stories in English and retold them in both Spanish and English. The analysis considers the data from the four previously mentioned points of view. The linguistic analysis looks at the locations of switched constituents within the sentence and the frequency with which those constituents are switched. The data of this study are compared with that of other researchers, and a consideration of a formal grammar of codeswitching is presented. The sociolinguistic analysis addresses the effect of social and stylistic variables on codeswitching. The psycholinguistic analysis of codeswitching covers lexical storage, editing phenomena, and developmental aspects. Finally, some aspects of the education of bilinguals are considered by analysing the effect of the printed word on language switching and dialect shifting . The application of the results of the analysis to both theoretical issues and practical concerns is explored along with suggested areas for future research. The analyses show that young children's codeswitching initially favors less complex structures and is influenced by few social variables. As they grow older, they become more comfortable with switching grammatically complex structures, and they become aware of a greater variety of social factors. A separate grammar is not necessary for a complete description of codeswitching; a modified interdependance model of the two grammars can account for the codeswitching mode. Lastly, the written language becomes part of the speech situation in the classroom and affects the choice of language or dialect spoken.

La presente tesina examina los efectos que tienen la edad de adquisición de una segunda lengua y su frecuencia de uso sobre las capacidades productivas y perceptivas en la L2. Para ello, tres grupos (bilingües tardíos, bilingües tempranos y monolingües) participaron en experimentos de producción, percepción (identificación y discriminación) y acceso léxico. A diferencia de las investigaciones previas acerca de la producción y pro- cesamiento en una L2, los bilingües tempranos del presente estudio son dominantes en su L2, el inglés. Concretamente, se demuestra que los bilingües tempranos difieren del grupo monolingüe en su producción y percepción de los contrastes vocálicos /i/ - /E/, /a/ - /æ/ y /i/ - /I/ del inglés. Asimismo, se afirma que los bilingües tempranos difieren del grupo monolingüe en su procesamiento léxico. Los resultados sugieren que, incluso para bilingües dominantes en su L2, estar expuesto a una edad temprana no garantiza la obtención de capacidades de producción, percepción ni acceso léxico a nivel de nativo.

No description available.

Though only a small island, Cyprus experiences particularly high rates of mixed marriages, and has one of the highest per capita ratios of immigrants in Europe. Consequently, there are a growing number of bilingual and bicultural children now entering the state elementary school system. The aim of this study is to examine the school experiences, language and identity of a select group of Greek English speaking children who have one Cypriot and one non-Cypriot parent. The sub-questions of the study focus on how the children manage languages at school, their perceptions of their peers and teachers and their opinions about the responsiveness of the school and teachers to their bilingualism. Additionally, while recognizing the fluidity and multiplicity of identity, questions about the expressions of the children’s dual national identities within school are considered. Finally, concerns over integration at school are also explored. The study claims social justice for this group, and develops a qualitative case study to engage with the manner in which the children employ their Greek and English language abilities at school, accompanied by their perceptions of the representations of their dual national identities. Multiple, individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with eight children, aged ten to twelve. Interviews with parents were also conducted as a means of strengthening the depth of the data. Additional artifacts such as language use charts, sentence completion exercises and brochures were also collected and analyzed. Using a thematic approach data was examined with the aim of understanding how the children experience their bilingualism and biculturalism within the school. The study constitutes the first of its kind in the Cypriot context and its findings are valuable for researchers, practitioners and policy makers alike. The results suggest that languages are ‘kept separate’ at school, there is a lack of recognition of this group’s bilingualism and there are possible issues of some children’s Cognitive-Academic Language proficiency (Cummins, 1979). Additionally, teachers and schools presented as ill prepared and nonresponsive to the linguistic needs of this group of children. Further findings indicate that the children experience incidents of teasing and exclusion influenced by the highly hellenocentric ethos of Cypriot schools. The study concludes that the limited definition of a bilingual student used by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus, combined with an ineffectual multiculturalism, result in this group being overlooked. The thesis suggests a broadening of the current definition of a bilingual student and a further exploration of children’s linguistic profiles. The study concludes that the children’s school experience is characterized by difference blindness to their dual cultural backgrounds and linguistic blindness to their bilingualism, broken only by regulated incidents of performance. Importantly the study also reveals that though impacted by a weak policy and difference blindness, these children engage in active agency in constructing social roles and understandings of language and identity at school. They demonstrate resilience and flexibility and are aware of the nuances of the school, the global value of their bilingualism, the access and opportunities provided by their knowledge of English and the prospects and experiences available to them through their dual cultural identities.

This thesis is a case study on the emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition. The investigation focuses on the transition from one-word to multiword utterances and the shaping of functional projections of Determiner, Agreement and Tense and their associated formal features. The empirical basis of this work is a corpus of thirty-nine videorecorded observations of Carlo, an English-Italian bilingual child, during free-play sessions with an adult. Data was collected separately for English and Italian for a period of fifteen months from when the child was 1;10 until he was 3;1, and was then transcribed in CHAT format. Four interrelated lines of enquiry inform the analysis presented here. The principal research question concerns the acquisitional strategies adopted by C. in these early stages of development in the two languages. A bilingual child is the closest one can get to a perfect matched pair where a number of variables such as socio-cognitive development, socio-economic status, parents' education, etc. are eliminated, and the two main variables to be investigated are the child's two input languages. This is an ideal situation in which the respective roles of general acquisitional strategies and language particular ones can be teased apart. An analysis of the emergence of the morphosyntactic correlates of Determiner, Agreement and Tense categories in English and Italian reveals a discrepancy between the two languages in the age of acquisition, rate of acquisition and in the language-specific strategies the child adopts. The observation of a significant difference in C.'s acquisitional strategies in English and Italian leads us to the second and third research questions: the way in which the emergence of functional categories differs between the two languages, and the reasons why this should be the case. The most obvious difference is the extent to which morphological correlates of functional categories emerge in the child's speech. In Italian, verbal and nominal morphology emerges earlier than in English and, at least in the nominal system, there is evidence that an Agreement category is part of the child's grammar. In English, verbal morphology is virtually non-existent by the end of the period of observation, and there is no substantial evidence that either Agreement or Tense are realised. Lexically-specific, item-based learning plays a substantial role in both languages, but in Italian there is some evidence that a number of grammatical contrasts are becoming productive by age 3;0, albeit some of them are still limited to a small number of lexical items. Two reasons were identified for the observed differences in the emergence of Determiner, Agreement and Tense in English and Italian: a typological reason, and an environmental reason. The former concerns the richness of Italian morphology, where grammatical contrasts are transparently marked both on nominal and verbal paradigms, as opposed to the relative poverty of English morphology where such contrasts correlate less obviously ans systematically with morphophonological markers. The latter reason concerns the very different input conditions in which C. is exposed to Italian and English: Italian is the home language spoken to him by his family and his babsysitters, while he is addressed in English by the staff at the nursery where one adult is in charge of several children and cannot engage in the one-to-one interaction which is typical of the dyadic situation in which C. finds himself at home. The differences observed in the lead-lag pattern between C.'s Italian and his English also provide sufficient evidence to address the fourth research question concerning the separate developement of the two languages. The analysis of the data did not reveal any systematic interferences from one language to the other. On the contrary there is evidence that C. is sensitive to the different morphosyntactic cues of his two input languages, and that he can treat the two as independent, self-contained problem spaces.

Continuous control of two languages during speech production may result in a ‘bilingual advantage’, where highly proficient bilinguals outperform monolinguals on nonverbal cognitive tasks. Greater linguistic distance between two bilingual languages is expected to influence this relationship, where bilinguals who engage with similar languages develop enhanced inhibitory control. To address this issue, this study examined reaction times and correct response rates on the attentional network task (ANT) and the Simon Task, where three different attentional networks (alerting, orienting and executive control) were examined. Two bilingual groups (English-German and English-Chinese) and one monolingual group (English) completed these attentional tasks as well as a Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q). Results did not provide unequivocal support for the ‘bilingual advantage’ hypothesis, which was only demonstrated by superior performance of bilinguals on the congruent and incongruent trials of the Simon Task. The Simon effect did not differ significantly between bilingual and monolingual participants, and no significant differences were revealed by performance on the ANT. The findings of this study also suggest that the effects of linguistic distance on cognitive functioning may not be quantitative in nature and should be investigated using neuroimaging techniques.

L'objectif de cette thèse est la description de l'oralité de l'enfant sourd et de son développement à travers le prisme d'une double perspective : celle du bilinguisme et de la multimodalité. Cette double perspective permet d'envisager l'oralité dans toutes ses dimensions – vocales et gestuelles d'une part, verbales et non-verbales d'autre part – afin de rendre compte de la spécificité des dynamiques langagières intra- et inter-modalités impliquées dans le développement des compétences de symbolisations orales chez l'enfant sourd, locuteur bilingue bimodal (français/LSF) en devenir. L'étude s'appuie sur les productions langagières de 30 enfants scolarisés dans des structures différentes (oraliste, bilingue, « mixte »). Les réflexions sur les outils d'analyse développés pour appréhender, décrire et transcrire les pratiques des locuteurs sourds dans leurs aspects bilingues et multimodaux constituent le premier volet de notre travail. Le second volet s'attache à rendre compte de la place des langues et des modalités dans les parcours de socialisation langagière des enfants sourds en analysant les stratégies adaptatives mises en œuvre dans la diversité des interactions quotidiennes auxquelles ils sont confrontés dans l'espace scolaire, avec les enseignants ainsi qu'avec leurs pairs sourds ou entendants. Le troisième volet se centre plus particulièrement sur la manière dont les dimensions langagières et linguistiques de la bimodalité sont impliquées dans le développement des compétences orales – lexicales et narratives – des enfants sourds. / This thesis aims to describe deaf children orality and its development through a dual perspective: bilingualism and multimodality. This dual perspective enables us to consider orality in all its dimensions – vocal and gestural on one side, verbal and non-verbal on the other – in order to account for the specificities of the linguistic intra- and inter-modality dynamics which are involved in the development of orality of deaf children, bimodal bilingual (French/LSF) speakers in the making. This study is based on a corpus of narratives from 30 deaf children in various types of schooling (oralist, bilingual, “mixed”). Theoretical aspects of the tools we developed to comprehend, describe and transcribe the deaf speakers practices in their bilingual and multimodal aspects will be presented in the first part. The second part will seek to underline the place of languages and modalities in the socialisation process of deaf children by analysing adaptive strategies used in the diverse daily interactions they are dealing with inside the school environment, both with teachers and their deaf or hearing peers. The third part will focus primarily on the way the linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of bimodality are involved in the development of oral skills – lexical and narrative – of deaf children.

The present study examines the nature of bilingual lexical access using category fluency across five language combinations using 109 healthy speakers of Hindi-English, Kannada-English, Mandarin-English, Spanish-English, and Turkish-English. Participants completed a category fluency task in each of their languages in three main categories (animals, clothing, food), each with two subcategories, as well as a language use questionnaire assessing their proficiency in each of their languages. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that the average number of correct items named in the category fluency task across the three main categories varied across the different groups for English items only. A series of repeated-measures analyses of covariance revealed that the exposure component that had been extracted from the language use questionnaire using a principal component analysis significantly affected the average number of items named across the three main categories. When the effect of exposure was controlled, the effect of language combination was no longer significant. A regression analysis showed that the relative amount of exposure participants had to each of their languages predicted participants’ relative performance in each language. Additional multivariate analyses of variance found significant differences in the number of correct items named in each main category and subcategory in both English and participants’ other language based on language combination. Overall, these results demonstrate the effects of particular language combinations on bilingual lexical access and provide important insights into the role of proficiency on access.