I almost feel sorry for this guy

So, this guy is managing a dilapidated hotel in Taos, NM. He’s trying to turn it around. The employees speak Spanish for the most part and they speak English too. The manager wants them to speak English and to use the Anglicized versions of their names because he claims they’ll be easier to understand on the phone. The interviewers verbally beat this poor guy up! But is he right?

Immigrant Parents and Language Learning

I am the child of immigrants. Like many children growing up in dual language environments, I grew up speaking a home language (Spanish) and although I knew some English, I learned most of my English in school– starting in kindergarten. My mother in fact says we learned English together.  As a child I quickly became aware that the English spoken by my parents and that spoken by the rest of the world was not the same. Today, I came across this article in SF Gate where Jeff Yang talked about conversations with his mother-in-law in context of reading two popular blogs: my mom is a fob and my dad is a fob. I laughed and I cried, what can I say. These are exactly the kinds of interactions I’ve had with my parents and continue to have with my mom. Malapropisms, eggcorns, and spoonerisms– I had to have a whole dictionary for what my parents meant. But, through it all parents convey that they love their children and that they care. While the two fob sites draw on examples of Asian moms and dads– let me tell you this stuff isn’t limited to Asian parents!  There are so many wonderful examples of exactly the kinds of interactions I had with my parents (okay, the accents and words were different but with the same kinds of slips and intents).

Nonword repetition in bilinguals

We completed this study a couple of years ago but it always takes some time to get things written up and then submitted and so on. Sometimes it’s a bit frustrating that the process takes so long. There are lots of papers I see at conferences that I might wait a couple of years before I see the full paper in print. It’s the same with our stuff of course, sometimes what we present at a conference is only one analysis or is with fewer participants than the final paper. The revision process usually helps to focus and strengthen the paper, but that also takes time.

Anyway, this is a long introduction to writing about a paper by Summers, Bohman, Gillam, Peña, & Bedore titled ”Bilingual performance on nonword repetition in Spanish and English” in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. In this paper we tested bilingual children on nonword repetition tasks in both their languages. We also tested some kids on the monolingual end of the continuum on both sets of words. The words we used are those developed by Dollaghan & Campbell (for English) and Janet Calderon (for Spanish).

Using Word Frequency Databases

As administrator of this blog, I am able to look at keywords that people use to find this site. One that comes up often is word frequency databases. I’m always curious about what people are looking for and how they might be using such databases. One corpus I’ve used several times is the one by Mark Davies at BYU. 

Academy of Aphasia: Satellite Meeting on bilingual aphasia

Dear friends,

As we all know, the topic of bilingual aphasia is of increasing interest worldwide and there has been a rise in the number of publications on this topic.

Loraine Obler and I plan to get a group of colleagues who work on bilingual aphasia together in a satellite meeting of the Academy of Aphasia in Boston the day before the Academy starts, Saturday, October 17, from 4:30 to 7:30 pm. Thanks to Dean Gloria Waters our meeting will be held at Boston University, reachable by public transportation from the Academy site. Refreshments and dinner will be served free of charge.

The goal of this meeting will be to discuss issues pertaining to the study of bilingual aphasia from the perspectives of both behavioral and imaging studies. We envision a session including such issues as (a) selection and description of bilingual aphasic patients, (b) methodological issues such as characterizing language use, proficiency, dominance and preference, (c) assessment and diagnosis of bilingual aphasia and (d) treatment options for patients with bilingual aphasia.

Organizers: Swathi Kiran and Loraine Obler

Google goes Hawaiian

I read today that the Hawaiian language was added to google. Probably, that caught my eye because we went to Hawaii for 10 days this summer. It was a wonderful, relaxing, and fun trip. We even had daydreams that I could go to Hawaii to study bilingualism there. Hawaiian is part of the Polynesian language family. It had been on the decline, but through efforts to teach the language in schools the number of speakers has increased. Both Hawaiian and English are both official languages in Hawaii. We enjoyed the sounds and multisyllabic words of the language and it was certainly a challenge to my working memory.

Oh well, seeing that I don’t really know enought about the language to study Hawaiian-English bilinguals, I’ll have to stick to Spanish-English bilingualism (and other languages my colleagues know about). Unless of course there’s someone out there to collaborate with.

Bilingual Babies

I thought this article today reported by forbes.com on 12 month old babies exposed to two languages was really interesting. I haven’t yet read the article in Science, but I will. In this study babies who were learning language in a bilingual environment seemed to be able to demonstrate more flexibility in learning new words. This finding could be due to the fact that they have to learn different words (at least one in each language) for the same thing. 

So, where’s the GOLD?

Recently, I posted in my lab blog (or is it on my lab blog? I don’t know) about the challenges in developing a test for bilingual children. In collaboration with Aquiles Iglesias, Vera Gutierrez-Clellen, Brian Goldstein, and Lisa Bedore, I worked on development of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA)– a test for Spanish-English bilinguals designed for identification of language impairment. The challenge that we faced when we began this 7 year project (in 1998) is that there was very little data on markers of language impairment in other languages. In fact some of this information had just begun to emerge for language impairment in English speakers.

Testing ESL Children: What we can we do now

One of the challenges in assessment of bilingual children is deciding whether or not they have language impairment. On one hand SLPs might decide to wait for children to learn more English before they assess them. On the other hand it’s important to identify children who have language impairment early so that we can intervene.

As of yet there are no standardized tests for bilingual children. There are some standardized tests for children who speak other languages. But, often these tests are inappropriate because they do not apply to children who speak two languages. There are some folks working on development of such tests for Spanish-English speakers (including me), these are few and don’t apply to all language pairs or all ages. At least not yet. So, what can we do NOW for the kids who are referred for assessment of language ability? What do we do to make decisions about language ability in the absence of standardized tests or even in the absence of personnel who speak the child’s language?

The role of input

I read this news article while ago, January of this year to be exact and I thought it was really interesting. Paul Sulzberger proposes that people can begin to learn a second language by listening to it. This goes against conventional wisdom in teaching a second language. Often, the focus is on meaning and practice. The idea of focusing on meaning and practice makes sense because in learning a second language one can build on what you already know. You can use the ideas and meanings you know in L1 to match with new words (but same meanings) in L2. Similarly, you can use what you know about grammar in L1 to learn L2. Even if the grammar is different (and it is) you at least can think about the fact that there needs to be a way to talk about the past, present, and future. You know that there’s got to be a rule to talk about one thing vs. more than one thing. So, what does just listening do? How can you learn another language without knowing the meaning?