The Mysteries of Bilingualism

Author Biography vii Introduction 1 Part I Bilingual Adults and Children 5 1 Who Is Bilingual? 7 Definitions and Their Evolution 8 Describing Bilinguals 11 2 How Many Bilinguals Are There? 18 The Extent of Bilingualism 18 On the Difficulties of Counting People Who Are Bilingual 20 The Proportion of Bilinguals in a Number of Countries 23 Estimating the Percentage of Bilinguals in the World 27 3 Bilingual Infants' Journey to Language Separation 30 Perception Studies 31 Taking Pragmatics into Account 38 A Brief Account of Language Separation 40 Part II Linguistics and Neurolinguistics 43 4 Having an Accent in One of Your Languages 45 General Aspects 45 The Phonetic Characteristics of Accents 46 How Well Is Accented Speech Understood? 48 Factors that Affect the Degree of a Foreign Accent 50 Accent in a Third Language 55 5 Language Loss in Adults and Children 59 Language Loss in Adults 59 Language Loss in Young Children 63 6 Brain Injury and Bilingualism 72 A Personal Testimony 73 Language Impairment and Recovery in Bilingual Aphasia 74 Factors that Account for Impairment and Recovery 78 A Recent Meta-Analysis 81 Language Mixing and Aphasia 82 Part III Language Use and Language Processing 87 7 The Bilingual's Languages in Interaction 89 Choosing the Language of the Interaction 89 What Role for the Other Language? 92 Experimental Work on Language Mixing 94 The Language Mode Concept 97 8 What a Bilingual's Languages Are Used For 102 What Past Research Has Revealed 103 Recent Interest in Bilingual Language Use 104 Measuring Bilingual Language Use 106 Impact of Bilingual Language Use 109 9 Is Language Processing in Bilinguals Selective or Non-selective? 117 Language Perception and Comprehension 118 Spoken Language Production 122 Part IV Biculturalism and Personality 129 10 Bilinguals Who Are also Bicultural 131 Describing Biculturals 131 Becoming Bicultural and the Evolution of Biculturalism over Time 134 Acting Biculturally 137 Bicultural Identity 141 11 Change of Language, Change of Personality? 146 Opinions and Beliefs 147 Pioneering Research on the Question 147 Feeling Different When Using Different Languages 150 Is a Change of Personality Involved When Changing Languages? 152 An Explanation 154 Index 159