Interaction between grammatical categories and cognition in bilinguals: The role of proficiency, cultural immersion, and language of instruction

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that there is a tight link between grammatical concepts and cognitive preferences in monolingual speakers (Lucy 1992, Lucy & Gaskins 2003, Imai & Gentner 1997, Imai & Mazuka 2003). Recent research has also shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may shift their cognitive preferences as a function of their proficiency (Athanasopoulos, 2006) or cultural immersion (Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006). The current short paper assesses the relative impact of each of these variables, and furthermore asks whether bilinguals alternate between two distinct cognitive representations of language-specific concepts depending on the language used in the experiment. Results from an object classification task showed that Japanese–English bilinguals shifted their behaviour towards the second language (L2) pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency, while cultural immersion and language of instruction played a minimal role. These findings suggest that acquisition of novel grammatical categories leads to cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind and have implications for the relationship between language and cognitive processing.

Acknowledgements

Postgraduate ESRC award number: PTA-030-2002-01335 and the Sir Eric Berthoud Travel Grant (University of Essex). The author wishes to thank Professor Roger Hawkins, Dr Shigenori Wakabayashi, Kaori Arai, Satsuki Fukushima, Kayo Sato, Yuri Tokura, Yoshie Yamada, and Keiko Yamada, for assisting with this research. Parts of this paper have been previously presented at the 17^th International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in Thessaloniki, Greece, at the 15^th European Second Language Association conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and at the joint conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the Canadian Association for Applied Linguistics in Montreal, Canada.

The author is grateful to the audiences of those events for their helpful feedback, as well as to Dr Manuel Carreiras and two anonymous reviewers for Language and Cognitive Processes for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹Although not always strictly observed: depending on the communicative intentions of speakers, a small proportion of count or mass nouns may be used in ways that do not reflect their typical conceptual basis (e.g., I had three coffees this morning/the sauce contains onion etc.; for discussion see Allan, 1980, Wisniewski, Lamb, & Middleton, 2003). Furthermore, the syntax-semantics interface of the count/mass distinction is not absolute, since many mass nouns (e.g., furniture, people) can be used to refer to individuals (Barner & Snedeker, 2005).

²The grammaticality judgement task consisted of a text in English containing mistakes in the suppliance of the plural morpheme –s in required contexts. There were also other types of grammatical mistakes to act as distracters. The L2 speakers were instructed to underline any part of the text which had mistakes and write the correction underneath. The responses for each participant were scored by calculating the ratio of correct suppliance of plural –s to the number of required contexts.