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Language acquisition context and language organization in bilinguals

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Abstract

A distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism has been employed to conceptualize linguistic organization in bilinguals. Compound bilinguals are those who acquired their languages in a joint context and therefore are presumed to store linguistic information interdependently. Coordinates include those who acquired their languages in separate contexts and therefore are presumed to maintain independent linguistic stores. To study the usefulness of this distinction, Spanish-English and English-Spanish, compound, and coordinate bilinguals were asked to give intra-and interlingual free and restricted word associations to equivalent English and Spanish stimuli for which the responses of monolingual speakers were not equivalent. As predicted, compound bilinguals gave significantly more equivalent responses and responded significantly faster than did coordinates. However, since these differences were only modest in size, they cannot be interpreted as supporting the usefulness of the compound-coordinate distinction. None of the predictions regarding the effect of proficiency on performance were supported. Differences as a function of native language, type of association task, and association conditions were obtained and are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Queen's University, K7L 3N6, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

    William L. Gekoski

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  1. William L. Gekoski
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Additional information

This research was supported by USPHS Grant HD 01368 to Dr. Klaus Riegel, University of Michigan, and was included as one portion of a doctoral dissertation submitted by the author to the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

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Gekoski, W.L. Language acquisition context and language organization in bilinguals. J Psycholinguist Res 9, 429–449 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067324

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