Bilingualism: Cognitive Aspects

‘Bilingualism’ refers to the individual competence of comprehension and production of two (natural) languages. Basic cognitive aspects of bilingualism include: (a) issues of neural representations of bilingual language processing, (b) simultaneous or successive learning or acquisition processes of the two languages, (c) representations of linguistic forms and meanings in long-term and working memory, (d) language loss and forgetting, (e) metalinguistic awareness associated with L1 and L2 processing, and (f) code-switching and language mixing. Two major themes have dominated: are a bilingual's language systems separate modules, and how much interaction is between them? In what way are language forms (codes) and their meaning (knowledge structures) represented in the cognitive system? Research results indicate that at the beginning the second language is learned via the first; with increasing competence the two languages may function more and more separately but are associated by a network of translation equivalents. Only if the two languages are learned together early will a person reach native-like competence in both. Considerable semantic overlap in two languages will lead to a common conceptual system in one person, whereas the linguistic forms of the two languages will be used alternately.

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