Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

Languages differ from one another in the way their vocabularies carve up conceptual space and the physical world. For instance, both Russian and English have separate words for glasses and cups ( stakany and chashki in Russian), but the exact reference of these words differs between these languages: Paper cups are called stakanchiki (small glasses) in Russian (Pavlenko, 2005). Variation in the expression of concepts across languages exists for many semantic domains, perhaps all, and it occurs across both distantly related and closely related languages (Majid, Jordan, & Dunn, 2015). One of the best‐known examples of differential word‐to‐concept mapping across languages concerns the semantic domain of color concepts. Languages vary widely in the number of color words they possess to describe the color spectrum and, of course, the number of color words used in a specific language has consequences for the exact reference of each of these words: The smaller the number of color words, the larger the range of hues referred to by each of them.

The consequence of this cross‐language variability in color terminology for color categorization and representation in bilinguals has been examined since around 1960. One study concerned a detailed investigation of color naming in Navaho–English bilinguals and Navaho and English monolinguals (Ervin, 1961). Ervin first performed a detailed contrastive analysis of the color systems of Navaho and English. This analysis revealed, for instance, that litso , the closest Navaho translation of yellow , is the favored response of monolingual Navaho speakers to hues across a much larger part of the color spectrum than the range of hues exciting yellow in monolingual speakers of English. Assuming an influence from the colors' names in the nontarget language, Ervin expected the response probabilities in the target language to differ between the bilinguals and monolinguals. For instance, when presenting a yellowish color patch and inviting a color response in Navaho, the bilinguals were expected to produce fewer litso responses than the monolingual Navaho controls. These and other predictions from the contrastive analysis were borne out by the data.

Ervin explained these results in terms of coactivation in bilingual memory of the representation of the presented color's name in the nonresponse language. For example, a Navaho–English bilingual may say tatLqid (‘green’) to a color patch that most Navaho monolinguals would call litso (‘yellow’) because the common English name for the depicted color ( green ) is coactivated with litso . Coactivated green then activates tatLqid via a connection between these two words in memory and tatLqid emerges as the response. An alternative account of such semantic accents is in terms of differences in the conceptual representations of color words between bilinguals and monolinguals. This is how Caskey‐Sirmons and Hickerson (1977) explained the results of a similar study wherein English L2 speakers with various Asian languages as L1 were tested. Specifically, these authors assumed that, in the course of acquiring L2 English, broader conceptual representations of color words had been formed by merging the concepts associated with L1 color words and those associated with these words' closest L2 translations. But also here an interpretation of the results in terms of co‐activation of lexical representations in the nontarget language cannot be ruled out (De Groot, 2014), and a similar indeterminacy may apply to the different behavior of monolinguals and bilinguals in tasks that probe bilingual conceptual representation in other semantic domains (e.g., Ameel, Malt, Storms, & Van Assche, 2009, a study that examines the representation of common household objects).

The above discussion on how languages differ in the way they map words onto concepts implicitly introduced the notion of “linguistic relativity,” that is, the idea that language influences thought or, more precisely, that differences between languages in the way they encode aspects of the surrounding world cause speakers of different languages to think differently about the world. The theory not only applies to nominal concepts such as color but also to grammatical concepts such as tense, number, and gender. For example, the fact that verb forms in English but not in Indonesian contain tense markers (information about the time of the event or action described by the verb: past, present, or future) is thought to result in different time cognition in speakers of English and Indonesian. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) is regarded as the major advocate of this view, which is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (after Whorf and his mentor Edward Sapir).

Bilingual studies on linguistic relativity are still sparse, though their number is growing because of the awareness that bilingualism has the potential to critically inform the linguistic relativity debate. It may do so because “bilinguals are the only ones to experience directly the effects of linguistic relativity” (Pavlenko, 2005, p. 437). Do bilinguals experience different conceptual worlds when they speak their one or other language (a form of bilingualism that in the older literature is known as “coordinate bilingualism”)? If so, is each of these identical to the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of the languages concerned? In the case of sequential bilingualism (where L2 acquisition starts after L1 acquisition), are there intermediate states prior to an end state of experiencing two conceptual worlds and, if so, what are they? Or is it perhaps the case that bilinguals have developed a blended conceptual world shared by the two languages and different from the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of either language (known as “compound bilingualism”)?

Research suggests that some structural contrasts between a bilingual's two languages become reflected in conceptual representations that differ from those of monolingual speakers of these languages (e.g., Bassetti, 2007, a study on the effects of grammatical gender differences between Italian and German on the mental representation of objects; Athanasopoulos & Kasai, 2008, a study that examined the effect of grammatical number differences between English and Japanese on object representation). At least one bilingual study, testing the grammatical tense contrast between English and Indonesian (Boroditsky, Ham, & Ramscar, 2002), suggests that bilinguals can switch between two language‐specific modes of thinking and that this mental reset can be triggered by just a modicum of language. Recent studies on the conceptual representation of color similarly point at the flexibility of bilingual cognition by showing that bilinguals' responses in a color discrimination task varies with the usage frequency of either language (e.g., Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Krajciova, & Sasaki, 2011).

Until well beyond the middle of the 20th century the view prevailed that bilingualism is detrimental for intelligence and cognitive functioning in general. A study by Peal and Lambert (1962) marked a change from this view to the opinion that, under specific conditions, bilingualism is in fact beneficial for intelligence and cognition, including some aspects of linguistic competence. In that study 10‐year‐old French–English bilingual and French monolingual children from middle‐class French schools in Canada's Montreal region were administered a number of tests that measured their verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Whereas earlier studies had shown a disadvantage for bilingual children as compared with monolingual peers, the bilingual children in this study performed significantly better than the monolingual children on most tests, both the ones that measured verbal intelligence and those measuring nonverbal intelligence. The bilingual advantage was, for instance, manifest in tasks that assessed concept formation ability and mental flexibility, and the bilingual children showed a more diversified set of mental abilities than the monolingual children.