Bilingualism Across the Lifespan: Factors Moderating Language Proficiency

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century it is clear that the world’s citizens increasingly function in more than one language on an everyday basis, with consequences that go well beyond the realm of language. It is the purpose of this volume to present the latest research on bilingualism from this broader perspective, exploring the complex interaction between the acquisition, processing, and use of multiple languages throughout the lifespan and in different sociopolitical contexts and the effects of bilingualism on some nonlinguistic domains such as family functioning, literacy, cognition, and identity, to name a few. Primarily addressed to linguistics, psychology, and education students as well as to bilingualism scholars, the volume’s first goal is to underscore the variability of “the bilingual experience”—both in terms of language experiences and of language outcomes. At a superficial level, a bilingual speaker is defined as an individual who knows two languages, but the chapters in this book point to the inadequacy of this simple definition to capture the heterogeneity of bilingual speakers. Genesee (Chapter 1, this volume), in particular, expands on the myriad of ways bilingual speakers can differ from each other, from the pairs of languages spoken to the functions each language serves in bilingual speakers’ lives. The main implication is that because of their multidimensional nature, bilingual speakers must be studied in their own right, without reference to monolingual speakers as norms. Another crucial theme of the research presented in this volume is that language knowledge and use—be it monoor multilingual—are deeply intertwined with sociocultural and sociopolitical issues, like identity, status, power, and ability to participate in the community. Hence, bilingualism can be understood only when examined in the context in which it unfolds. Code-switching, for example, is often seen as a sign of confusion or language incompetence in the United States (MacSwan, Chapter 10) but as an asset and evidence of language mastery in Singapore (Yow, Patrycia, & Flynn, Chapter 5). Similarly, the ability to speak Spanish and be bilingual in the United States is not valued in the same way as in countries that are supportive of bilingualism (Montrul, Chapter 8). Few studies have directly compared how different sociocultural settings affect bilingualism, so we will return to this issue in the volume’s Conclusion. The third goal of this volume is to challenge scholars of linguistics and psychology to think about the generalizability of acquisition theories. A few decades ago, bilingualism was sometimes presented in language acquisition textbooks in the chapter on special populations. In one textbook used by one of the editors in graduate school, a discussion of bilingual first language acquisition was juxtaposed with learning to speak with cochlear implants. In recent years, researchers have begun