Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals - R.J.
Harris (Editor)
0 1992 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved. 51
Another View of Bilingualism
Francois Grosjean
Universitk d e Neuchatel
Abstract
A particular view of bilingualism--the monolingual (or fractional) view--is first
spelled out, and the negative consequences it has had on various areas of
bilingual research are discussed. A bilingual (or wholistic) view is then
proposed. According to it, the bilingual is not the sum of two complete or
incomplete monolinguals but a unique and specific speaker-hearer. Four
areas of research are discussed in this light: comparing monolinguals and
bilinguals, language learning and language forgetting, the bilingual child and
'semilingualism', and the bilingual's speech modes. A description of research
in mixed language processing concludes the chapter.
Only rarely do researchers working on the many facets of bilingualism take the
opportunity to sit back from their on-going work and reflect on some fundamental
issues regarding bilingualism and the bilingual person. Among the many issues that
should be kept at the forefront of research, we find the following:
1. What do we mean when we use the terms 'bilingual' and 'bilingualism"?
2. Is the bilingual person the 'sum' of two monolinguals or a specific speaker-
hearer in his or her own right?
3. Can one adequately compare monolinguals and bilinguals, and if so, can one
continue to do so with traditional procedures?
4. Can the linguistic tools and methods developed to study monolinguals be
used without reservation to study bilinguals?
These are some of the questions that will be raised in this chapter. A particular
view of bilingualism that has been prevalent in the field for decades and that we refer
to as the monolingual (or fractional) view of bilingualism will first be discussed. A
different view of bilingualism, called the bilingual (or wholistic) view, will then be
evoked and a number of areas of bilingual research that are affected by this different
perspective will be discussed. Finally, a series of studies aimed at obtaining a better
understanding of the processing of mixed speech will be summarized. Before
proceeding, however, it is important that we state what we understand by the terms
'bilingualism' and 'bilingual'. Bilingualism is the regular use of two (or more)
languages, and bilinguals are those people who need and use two (or more) languages
in their everyday lives.
52 F. Grosjean
The Monolingual (or Fractional) View of Bilingualism
We wish to argue that a monolingual (or fractional) view of bilingualism has played
too great a role in our study of people who use two languages in their everyday lives.
According to a strong version of this view, the bilingual has (or should have) two
separate and isolable language competencies; these competencies are (or should be)
similar to those of the two corresponding monolinguals; therefore, the bilingual is (or
should be) two monolinguals in one person.
It is interesting to ask why this view of bilingualism has been so prevalent among
researchers and educators, as well as among lay persons, be they monolingual or
bilingual. Perhaps the main reason is that language sciences have developed primarily
through the study of monolinguals who have been the models of the 'normal' speaker-
hearer. The methods of investigation developed to study monolingual speech and
language have been used with little, if any, modification to study bilinguals; strong
monolingual biases have influenced bilingual research, and the yardstick against which
any bilingual has been measured has inevitably been the ideal--monolingual--speaker-
hearer. (One should add to this the strong impact of writing systems which are always
monolingual.) It is worth asking how the research on bilingualism would have evolved
and what state it would be in today, had the scholars in the field all been bi- or
multilingual (in fact and in spirit) and had the research been conducted in societies
where bi- or multi-lingualism was the norm and not the exception.
The monolingual (or fractional) view of bilingualism has had a number of
consequences, among which we find:
a) Bilinguals have been described and evaluated in terms of the fluency and
balance they have in their two languages
The 'real' bilingual has long been seen as the one who is equally and fully fluent
in two languages. He or she is the 'ideal', the 'true', the 'balanced', the 'perfect'
bilingual. All the others (in fact, the vast majority of people who use two languages
in their everyday life) are 'not really' bilingual or are 'special types' of bilinguals; hence
the numerous qualifiers found in the literature: 'dominant', 'unbalanced', 'semilingual',
'alingual', etc. This search for the 'true' bilingual has used traditional language tests
as well as psycholinguistic tests which are constructed around the notion of 'balance';
among these we find tests in which visual stimuli have to be named as fast as possible
in one language or the other, or tests in which associations have to be given to stimuli
in each of the two languages. Invariably, the ideal bilingual subject is the one who
does as well in one language as in the other. All other subjects are somehow 'less
bilingual' and are put into an indeterminate category--they are neither monolingual nor
'really bilingual'!
b) Language skills in bilinguals have almost always been appraised in terms of
monolingual standards
Another View of Bilingualism 53
The tests used with bilinguals are often quite simply the tests employed with the
monolinguals of the two corresponding language groups. These tests rarely take into
account the bilingual’s differential needs for the two languages or the different social
functions of these languages (what a language is used for, with whom and where). The
results obtained from these tests invariably show that bilinguals are less proficient than
the corresponding monolinguals. This, in turn, is seen as a problem by the
monolingual environment. It would appear that much of the current controversy
surrounding so-called ’semilingualism’ or ’alingualism’ in children is affected by the
prevalence of the monolingual viewpoint and by the monolingual tests which have been
used. These may be appropriate for monolingual children but not for the other kinds
of children: those who are monolingual in the other language, those who are in the
process of becoming bilingual, or those who have attained a stable level of bilingualism.
Monolingual tests are, for the most part, quite inappropriate to evaluate the language
skills of bilinguals.
c) The effects of bilingualism have been closely scrutinized
Because the monolingual viewpoint considers bilingualism as the exception (when,
in fact, half of the world’s population is bilingual) and because bilinguals should be two
monolinguals in one person, the cognitive and developmental consequences of
bilingualism have received close scrutiny. (One can wonder why the cognitive
consequences of monolingualiam have not been investigated with the same care!).
Numerous studies have ’pushed’ the apparent negative effects or the apparent positive
effects of bilingualism, and have done so with such force that it is rare to find an
educator or a lay person who does not have an opinion on the subject. What we fail
to remember is that numerous problems still surround the ’effects’ literature: children
have rarely been tested in the appropriate language or languages (how many tests use
mixed language with children whose normal input and output is mixed language? how
many tests use the language variety the child is used to? etc.); matching and sampling
procedures remain questionable despite all the criticisms that have been made; and
few studies manage to show a direct, unambiguous, causal relationship between using
two languages in one’s everyday life and various cognitive effects.
d) The contact of the bilingual’s two languages is seen as accidental and
anomalous
Because bilinguals are (or should be) two separate monolinguals in one person,
covert or overt contact between their two languages should be rare. The two language
systems should be autonomous and should remain so at all times. If there is contact,
it is accidental and is simply the result of language interference; ’borrowings’ and
’code-switches’, which are often conscious and intentional in conversations with other
bilinguals, are either included in the interference category or are explained away as the
product of ’sloppy’ language.
e ) Research on bilingualism is in large part conducted in terms of the bilingual’s
individual and separate languages
54 F. Grosjean
The monolingual view of bilingualism has influenced the many domains of
bilingualism research. For example, researchers studying language acquisition have too
often concentrated solely on the development of the new language system and, with
few exceptions, have paid no real attention to what happens concurrently to the first
language as it restructures itself in contact with L2. In addition, researchers have
invariably used the monolingual child as the yardstick against which to judge the
bilingual. Sociolinguists have long been interested in what the bilingual’s languages are
used for, when they are used, with whom, etc. and yet many surveys are still done
solely in terms of the two separate languages; they then have problems categorizing
the ’Both languages at the same time’ answers. Psycholinguists have been interested
in how the bilingual’s two languages are activated one at a time, how one language gets
switched on while the other gets switched off, and hence have paid little attention to
the simultaneous activation of the two languages as in the case of borrowing and code-
switching. Linguists have shown little interest in the bilingual’s language competence
in the Chomskyan sense, maybe because the bilingual can never be an ’ideal speaker-
hearer’ in the same way that the monolingual supposedly can; there is no real
acceptance among linguists that the bilingual’s two grammars can be quite different
from the corresponding monolingual grammars or that language competence (and
especially first language competence) can actually change when it comes into contact
with another language. Finally, many speech therapists and neurolinguists are still
using standard monolingual tests with their bilingual subjects; these tests very rarely
take into account the situations and domains the languages are used in, nor do they
take into account the type and amount of code-mixing the person is involved in on a
daily basis. Thus, much of what we know about bilingualism today is tainted--in part
at least--by a monolingual, fractional, view of bilingualism.
(f) Bilinguals rarely evaluate their language competencies as adequate
The monolingual view of bilingualism is assumed and amplified by most bilinguals,
and they exteriorize this in different ways: some criticize their own language
competence: ’Yes, I use English every day at work, but I speak it so badly that I’m not
really bilingual’; ’I mix my languages all the time, so I’m not a real bilingual’, etc.;
others strive their hardest to reach monolingual norms (how many bilinguals have been
put down by other bilinguals who strive to be ’pure’ monolinguals?); and still other
hide their knowledge of their ’weaker’ language.
To conclude this section, it is important to stress how negative--often destructive--
the monolingual view of bilingualism has been, and in many areas, still is. It is time
that we accept the fact that bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one person, but
different, perfectly competent speaker-hearers in their own right. It is this view that
that will now be developed.
The Bilingual (or Wholistic) View of Bilingualism
The bilingual or wholistic view of bilingualism (Grosjean, 1982, 1985) proposes that
the bilingual is an integrated whole which cannot easily be decomposed into two
Another View of Bilingualism 55
separate parts. The bilingual is NOT the sum of two complete or incomplete
monolinguals; rather, he or she has a unique and specific linguistic configuration. The
co-existence and constant interaction of the two languages in the bilingual has
produced a different but complete language system. An analogy comes from the
domain of track and field. The high hurdler blends two types of competencies, that
of high jumping and that of sprinting. When compared individually with the sprinter
or the high jumper, the hurdler meets neither level of competence, and yet when taken
as a whole the hurdler is an athlete in his or her own right. No expert in track and
field would ever compare a high hurdler to a sprinter or to a high jumper, even though
the former blends certain characteristics of the latter two. A high hurdler is an
integrated whole, a unique and specific athlete, who can attain the highest levels of
world competition in the same way that the sprinter and the high jumper can. In many
ways, the bilingual is like the high hurdler: an integrated whole, a unique and specific
speaker-hearer, and not the sum of two complete or incomplete monolinguals.
Another analogy comes from the neighbouring domain of biculturalism. The bicultural
person (the Mexican-American, for example) is not two monoculturals; instead, he or
she combines and blends aspects of the two cultures to produce a unique cultural
configuration.
According to the wholistic view, then, the bilingual is a fully competent speaker-
hearer; he or she has developed competencies (in the two languages and possibly in
a third system that is a combination of the first two) to the extent required by his or
her needs and those of the environment. The bilingual uses the two languages-
separately or together--for different purposes, in different domains of life, with
different people. Because the needs and uses of the two languages are usually quite
different, the bilingual is rarely equally or completely fluent in the two languages.
Levels of fluency in a language will depend on the need for the language and will be
extremely domain specific (hence the ’fossilized’ competencies of many bilinguals in
each of their two languages).
Because the bilingual is a human communicator (as is the monolingual), he or she
has developed a communicative competence that is sufficient for everyday life. This
competence will make use of one language, of the other language or of the two
together (in the form of mixed speech) depending on the situation, the topic, the
interlocutor, etc. The bilingual’s communicative competence cannot be evaluated
correctly through only one language; it must be studied instead through the bilingual’s
total language repertoire as it is used in his or her everyday life.
A number of areas of research are affected by this wholistic view of bilingualism;
a few will be discussed below.
Comuarine Monolineuals and Bilineuals
A wholistic view of bilingualism and the bilingual should lead, hopefully, to a more
complete and fairer comparison of bilinguals and monolinguals in terms of language
competence, language performance, language learning, etc. The comparison will need
