On the Representation of Two Languages in One Brain  

Oleh:

Paradis, Michel

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 7 no. 1 (1985), page 1-39.
Fulltext: 07_01_Paradis.pdf (2.01MB)

Isi artikel

While the study of bilingualLsm has been steadily gaining important ground for quite some time, in sociolinguistics and most certainly developmental psycholinguistics, the relevance of bilingualism to the neurology of language in particular and to neuroscience in general has only recently been paid much attention to. The reason is because cases of aphasia in bflinguals and polyglots are numerous but the number seen by any individual researcher remains small. For a comprehensive anthology of such cases, see Paradis (1983). The aim of this paper is to carefully review four kinds of literature, with a threefold purpose. Specifically, (1) the various hypotheses about the lateralization of language functions in bflinguals are identified and their implications for the acquisition of a second language considered. In so doing, (2) other plausible parameters of differential representation of two languages in one brain are examined: the participation of the limbic system during language acquisition and the possible role of sociolingfiistic factors. (3) The various hypotheses concerning the intrahemispheric cortical organization of two languages are also investigated. Attempts are made to overcome the weaknesses of two mutually exclusive hypotheses concerning the way a bilingual stores linguistic information; that is, (1) all information is kept in a common store and (ii) information is stored linguistically in separate stores. What has been ascertained so far from the study of aphasia in bilingual patients is that: (1) two languages can be functionally independent; (2) linguistic competence (mnemic traces) is distinct from performance (access to these traces and thek actual use); (3) there is a clear dissociation in performance between comprehension and production; (4) there are different components of linguistic structure, each admitting of independent interference in normal bilingual subjects and of selective impairment in aphasic patients; (5) lexical meanings (which are language-dependent) are distinct from experiential and conceptual mental representations (which are language-independent); (6) words are not stored as units but as connected sets of very different kinds of representations; and (7) two languages are not necessarily organized in identical fashion in the brain of all bilingual individuals; indeed, bilinguals vary along a considerable number of dimensions (see Paradis 1984).

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