Psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism

Abstract

There are far more bilingual people in the world than monolingual. Psycholinguistics, however, still approaches language and the speaker/hearer from the point of view of monolingualism, supposing this to be the normal state. It is necessary not only to broaden the frame of psycholinguistics but also to give bilingualism the place it deserves in humanities. Monolingualism, not bilingualism, is the problem in the present‐day world. We can look at bilingualism from at least three different perspectives: from the perspective of languages and cultural systems, from the perspective of the individual and from the perspective of a group or society. In my paper I shall focus on the individual, keeping in mind, however, that he is always connected with larger units as groups and society. His communicative behaviour, thus, has to be analysed against the background of sociocultural frames: the psycholinguistic approach has to take into account the interaction of language and social structure. In this new approach it becomes evident that psycholinguistics has to orientate itself on the functionalistic‐communicative trends of linguistics. Psycholinguistics approaches spoken language mainly from the verbal elements, without evaluating the possible simultaneous information from the paralinguistic and nonverbal elements. Our approach will include also this perspective. The aim of my paper is to discuss a couple of questions concerning the what, why, how and when of bilingualism and its relations to biculturalism.