Questions tagged [bilingualism]
The acquisition or learning of two or more languages, in childhood or adulthood.
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On stimuli control
everyone!
I have a very simple question (I think). Has anyone here done a psycholinguistics experiment? After having run my first experiment, I realized that what I had controlled to build the ...
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Is bilingualism a normal/an "intrinsic" human ability or did it become more common in modern times?
I live in the USA where speaking basically only English is common but I know in most parts of the world, this is unusual and I believe elsewhere, especially in smaller countries, a second language is ...
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
An answer to a different question pointed out that the vast majority of search engine queries coming from Ukraine, before the invasion, seemed to be in Russian. That was despite the fact that the ...
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Can you have two first languages?
I was born in Germany but my mother is from Brazil. Therefore, I speak with her in Portuguese and everyone else in German. The thing is, I moved to Brazil when I was 13-14. I never had much difficulty ...
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Is there a general list of words that second language speakers find 'sticky' and forget to translate?
This question is motivated by some creative writing and world building I'm doing, but it has another real-world inspiration that I would like a real-world linguistics answer to.
My in-laws (and my ...
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"Ser"/"estar" acquisition in bilingual children (English-Spanish)
For the last week I've been wondering about how bilingual children (English-Spanish) might struggle with the acquisition of the "ser"/"estar" copulas, considering how these are ...
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Do bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language than monolinguals?
There is conflicting information online, and I believe search engines just push me the "pop facts" instead of the modern scientific consensus.
Do native bilinguals have smaller vocabularies ...
user31190
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Are cognitive benefits of bilinguals proof of independence of thought and language?
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis says that language determines thought. Chomsky's theory states that cognition and language are independent systems.
Biliguals have an advantage in several areas of ...
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Does California vowel shift occur in bilingual Spanish speakers?
I know that recently there has been a lot of research done on the California vowel shift being a key part of a California accent for younger kids who have grown up there.
Knowing that there is a ...
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Term for conversation where each person speaks a different language, while understanding each other
I would like to know if there is a technical (or common) term for the type of bilingual (or multilingual) conversation described in the title. For example, one person could be speaking French, while ...
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How do children learn to identify different languages?
A child can be raised in a sufficiently bilingual context that they learn two languages simultaneously, e.g. English & Spanish, Norwegian and Saami. The end product is that they have two ...
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Is it possible to become truly Native Level in a secondary language?
I will specify that people born into bilingual families do not count. It must be someone who started learning the language after childhood (where one's susceptibility to language is virtually cheating)...
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Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***
This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear.
What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two ...
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Do grammatically close languages tend to begin to use literal translations of some words in other senses in that other language?
Let's have an English phrase "let's have" and the Czech equivalent "mějme". Perhaps, at some point in the past, someone was translating a math textbook and didn't know how to translate "let's have" in ...
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Does a coherent sentence which is a cross language homophone exist?
Consider a basic example of the French word oui, and the English word we. Phonetically these words are pronounced identically (okay some French speakers may put emphasis on the oo sound in oui, but ...
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Do natively bilingual people have accents in one or both of their languages?
Do people who grew up speaking multiple languages typically have a discernible foreign accent in one or more of their primary languages?
Also do they tend to make the kinds of mistakes that non-...
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Is it possible to not only lose/gain an accent, but also lose some fluency in native language? [duplicate]
Pardon the awkward phrasing in the title, but I am essentially wondering about the following scenario.
A person, Alice, grows up bilingual, speaking languages A and B. She lives in a country C in ...
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simultaneous bilingualism [closed]
Are there any reliable studies on simultaneous bilingualism effects. What effects does it have on children when they are only learning to read and write in one. More importantly how does it effect ...
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Reasons for code switching absence
In bilingual regions often there's a phenomenon known as code switching, when people swap codes when confronted with a person that uses a different language of their own, even when both people are ...
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What is the linguistic term for an environment where parents teach a second language to their children in lieu of the parents' native language?
For example, Lebanon is an Arabic-speaking country. However, many parents insist on speaking to their children exclusively in English or French and refuse or severely limit the use of Arabic. Is there ...
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Is it true that one can be bilingual in any pair of languages or are some languages 'incompatible' with one another when learned in childhood?
There are many stories of a child speaking several languages when his parents speak different languages.
But languages can differ significantly, so I'm curious whether pairs of 'incompatible' ...
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Am I a native English speaker? (born I Hungary, lived in US from age 3)
I'm not sure if I'm going to get any answers, but I am trying to find out whether I can qualify as a native english speaker.
Here's my story:
born in Hungary
moved to US at age 3
spoke Hungarian ...
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Schneider's Model: What's the differences between stages 3 and 4?
Schneider's dynamic model gives an account of the evolution of languages in a post-colonial setting.
According to the Wikipedia article, Stage 3 is defined as:
(3) Contact-induced changes can be ...
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Determining my native language
The other day I was filling out a form where I had to state my native language and I simply couldn't seem to find an answer to that question. I guess it had never come across me, but I simply had ...
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Simultaneous bilingualism vs Sequential bilingualism
Simultaneous bilingualism (or multilangualism) is when a child acquires two (or many) languages simultaneously, for example when they are raised by parents speaking more than one language.
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Are similar languages easier for children to acquire than dissimilar ones?
When a child is first learning a language in a bilingual environment, is it easier or harder to properly acquire the two distinct languages if they are more similar? For example, is it easier for a ...
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