This book is an anthology that makes a treatise out of 25 years of study woven together with some new writing. The central thesis, which states that we need a holistic view of bilingualism, is both stunningly simple and obvious. Grosjean first proposed it in 1985, shortly after the publication of Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism (1982). Given that at least half the world’s population is (and always has been) bilingual, bilingualism should be studied as a normal form of linguistic and sociolinguistic competence, not as the exception to monolingualism or the doubling of monolingualism. Selected work around this central idea since the 1982 publication is presented here, in terms of its impact on four areas of research: the bilingual individual, experimental psycholinguistics, the effect of language multimodality on bilingualism, and, finally, some methodological and conceptual implications in taking a bilingual view of bilingualism.
The first part of this book focuses on the bilingual individual. The first chapter presents the central thesis as a reprint of the 1985 article. The second chapter, written for the book and based on articles from the 1990s, examines the complementarity principle that a bilingual’s different languages are used for different purposes with different people. Language restructuring is discussed and ideas on language mode are introduced.
The second and third parts of the book deal with experimental psycholinguistics. In Part 2, chapter 4 reprints a 2001 article defining language mode as the relative activation of a bilingual’s two languages described as base language (the chosen active language of the moment) and language B (with relative levels of activity). Chapter 5 reports on studies of language mode, one reprinted from a 1997 article and two others that are more recent, both of which address psycholinguistic areas of language acquisition, production, perception, and loss. Also introduced are methodological considerations.
The base language effect is explored in great detail in terms of speech perception (in chapters 6 and 7) and production (in chapter 8). The chapters on perception include work done in the 1980s on how codeswitched words are perceived when embedded in a base language utterance. From the bilingual perspective, Grosjean asks:“Could switching really delay the processing of language, when its very purpose in every day life is precisely to ease the communication flow between bilinguals?” (p. 89). In studies that control for context, and for phonological or lexical input (including the use of nonsense words), he finds that both acoustic-phonetic information and the base language of conversation influence perception of a codeswitched word. In contrast, Grosjean finds that, in production, the base language has no apparent effect on the phonetics of codeswitched words. It might have made sense to examine production before perception; if codeswitching is normally phonetically complete, then studies that compare effects of base language and codeswitched language phoneticization on perception of codeswitched words may have no real-world reflection.
Building on these findings of phonetic and categorical information about codeswitched words, Part 4 focuses on linguistic properties of the spoken word. Included is a previously unpublished paper co-authored with Léwy on the bilingual model of lexical access (BIMOLA). Part 5 moves from the psycholinguistic to the sociolinguistic examination of biculturalism as well as of bilingualism. Chapter 13, on the bilingualism and biculturalism of the deaf, was written specifically for this book and may be the most interesting in that it draws together all of the ideas previously presented. It examines language skills and modalities, biculturalism between the deaf and hearing communities, and the cultural choices the deaf must make. It also examines both parallels with hearing bilinguals and unique aspects and challenges for the deaf bilingual. The chapter ends with a well-supported and impassioned plea for deaf children to be bilingual—that is, to learn their local sign language, which among other things triggers the development of language capacity including oral language.
The final two chapters, making up Part 6 of the book, are reprints of work within the last 10 years on methodology for the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic study of bilinguals. These chapters offer an appropriate culmination of this treatise developing and testing a holistic approach to the bilingual individual built on the concepts developed and tested over 25 years.
