Biliteracy (Eine Einführung in die Zweisprachigkeit und das Lesenlernen in verschiedenen Sprachen, in: Developmental

• Martin 2013 Biliteracy.pdfMartin Karin : Biliteracy (Eine Einführung in die Zweisprachigkeit und das Lesenlernen in verschiedenen Sprachen, in: Developmental Dyslexia and Foreign Language Learning. A Working Memory Approach. Dissertation, Universität von Verona, 2013). According to Grosjean (1998) an answer to the question “Who is bilingual?” should be “Half of the world population”. Nonetheless, ideological and political prejudices led in the past to a misleading image of reality. Actually, nowadays in the USA it is difficult to find out a sufficient number of monolinguals in order to conduct psycholinguistic experimental studies (Fabbro, 1996: 115). Furthermore, in Italy, as in the rest of the world, a person generally speaks her language and the dialect of the geographical area where she lives. 1. Biliteracy 1.1. A brief introduction to Bilingualism According to Grosjean (1998) an answer to the question “Who is bilingual?” should be “Half of the world population”. Nonetheless, ideological and political prejudices led in the past to a misleading image of reality. Actually, nowadays in the USA it is difficult to find out a sufficient number of monolinguals in order to conduct psycholinguistic experimental studies (Fabbro, 1996: 115). Furthermore, in Italy, as in the rest of the world, a person generally speaks her language and the dialect of the geographical area where she lives. Bilingualism is therefore found in most countries, at all levels of society, and in all age groups. I won’t discuss here the copious definitions that the word “bilingualism” has received over the years by different researchers; let’s just take the one by Grosjean (1998) as a reference: “bilinguals are people who use two (or more) languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives”. According to Sorace (2006), many prejudices regarding bilingualism influence our culture. First of all, a very common belief is the one according to which bilinguals are less intelligent (or, on the contrary, more intelligent) than monolinguals. None of these claims is true, because there is no link between bilingualism and general ‘intelligence’ (Sorace, 2006); furthermore both conclusions have been found to be failing to take important sociological and cultural effects into account (Grosjean, 1982). Nevertheless, the experience of dealing with two languages seems to give bilingual children some cognitive advantages in several domains. As we will see in the following section, such advantages are particularly evident in tasks that involve cognitive flexibility and control of attention (Bialystok 1991; 2001). The relation between bilingualism and enhanced cognitive control stems on the fact that bilinguals must develop a powerful mechanism for keeping two languages separate. Indeed, there is a consensus in cognitive psychology literature on bilingualism that both languages are always simultaneously active (Green, 1998). Thus, bilinguals constantly have to inhibit one language when speaking the other; this seems to improve their ability to multitask in other domains. Moreover, because bilinguals are able to perceive the linguistic competence of the person they are speaking to, they are said to have a high “awareness of the other”. It has been found that bilinguals actually develop this ability one year earlier than monolinguals, when tested on a classical Theory of Mind test. However, as Theory of Mind has also been found to correlate with central executive functions1, like planning, problem-solving, and inhibition of habitual responses, bilinguals’ superior performance may be due to their greater ability to suspend their own irrelevant beliefs, rather than to an understanding of other people’s mental state (Sorace, 2006).