Do graduates of American high schools need to master English before they finish High School? A decision by the Oregon Board of Education says no. What is this about? What is mastery of a language anyway? read more…
Its been more than a month since we hosted the satellite meeting on bilingual aphasia at Boston University and here is an update. The meeting was a great success! We had about 45 attendees from across the world including Australia, China, Malaysia, Turkey, Norway, India and of course USA. Even more impressive was the number of languages that the researchers collectively represented, easily over 20 different languages. Clearly the topic of bilingual aphasia is of increasing research interest worldwide.
We are in the process of developing the new bilingual aphasia website– stay tuned to this page for information about the new URL. We will have video clips of various speakers at the meeting (Yasmeen Faroqi Shah, Nina Dronkers, Mira Goral, MJ Taintourier, Susan Edwards, Anthony Kong and Brian McWhinney) discuss what they thought were burning issues in the field of bilingual aphasia. We also hope to develop the website into a resource site for articles on bilingual aphasia and perhaps a way for bilingual aphasia researchers to connect and network.
So, stay tuned for information about this website. Also, thanks to all the people who attended for make this event possible and a success.
Good morning and a happy Thanksgiving to everyone. This post is to discuss the use of the term “foreign languages”. I must confess that it is becoming a peeve of mine to read references, policy documents, and position papers containing the term “foreign languages”. What are those? Aren’t all languages foreign to someone, depending on who’s using the term? I advocate that we use the terms “diverse languages”, “non-English languages”, or use descriptors of language families (e.g. Indo-European or more specifically Germanic, Slavic, etc). To refer to English as English and other languages as foreign seems just a wee bit Anglocentric to me and perhaps facilitates the perception that the “foreign language” is somehow a distant idea or an uncommon notion. The truth is we in the United States represent a diverse and rich linguistic tapestry and many non-English languages are no longer foreign here.
My original intent was to write about our new article coming out in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (shameless plug I know), but this news article about L2 learners learning to distinguish spoken words by reading caught my eye.
In the original study published in PLoS ONE the authors argue that seeing a written word in addition to hearing it helps listeners to figure out what the word is (when it’s distorted or an element is missing). This helps listeners within a language understand another regional dialect (say an American English speaker hearing Australian English or a Mexican Spanish speaker listening to Argentine Spanish). Of course some of the differences are lexical but many are about the sounds and stress patterns.
The authors proposed that this same strategy could be used for second language learners who were used to another regional variety of that language. They had Dutch speakers who knew English watch excerpts of TV shows in Australian English or Scottish English (the participants indicated they had not spent significant time in either country). Three conditions were used: no subtitles, subtitles in English, subtitles in Dutch with half the participants watching Scottish and the other half Australian excerpts.
The Dutch participants were tested after watching 25 minutes of an episode. They listened to sentences from Scottish English and Australian English and had to repeat them. One quarter of the sentences were from the show they had watched, 1/4 were in the same dialect, but hadn’t heard the particular sentences before, and the rest (1/2) were from the other dialect. read more…
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? read more…
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). read more…
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). read more…
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. read more…
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
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.
