BILINGUALISM DEFINED

I was listening to a TED talk called the Benefits of a Bilingual Brain, and I finally have a way to define myself. I am a subordinate bilingual!

I recently worked with a trainee from my home town, and he described the difficulties of working in two languages from a unilingual culture. I described my bilingualism as being incomplete, but joked that he would be happy to discover, that when he returned home, he might be seen closer to bilingual than he was here.

Mia Nacamulli explains that language is made up of 4 parts. Two active parts are speaking and writing. Two passive parts are listening and reading. A balanced bilingual has near equal ability across the board in two languages. Most bilinguals, however, vary in their use and knowledge. 

She breaks the bilingual/multilingual phenomenon into 3 categories based on how they acquire language. There are differences in the brain that occur depending on how and when the acquisition occurs.

The COMPOUND bilingual processes two linguistic codes simultaneously, and leads to the CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS, involving both hemispheres in language acquisition.

Both COORDINATE and SUBORDINATE bilinguals lateralize language to one hemisphere, usually the left.  While the coordinate bilingual works with two sets of concepts, subordinate bilinguals learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language.

These differences are paralleled to phases of life. While becoming bilingual as a child, compound bilinguals develop. As a teen, coordinate bilinguals learn. As an adult, subordinate bilinguals develop.

It is clear that we can all become bilingual. While children have plasticity to their advantage, all of us can acquire additional languages. 

Interesting advantages include brain health, with delay of Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. The adult may exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problmes in the second language than in their native one. I definitely can confirm this to be true for myself, and have switched the argument to french in order to temper my words, by both slowing them done and keeping the argument less personal, and closer to the basic issues at hand. It also seems that bilingual students, while showing increased reaction time and errors, have great effort and attention, triggering more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information.