Books

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked.

The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.

The present volume represents a variety of portraits of what happens when families attempt to raise children in Spanish while living in English-speaking societies. Aided by the foregrounding chapter by Suzanne Romaine about language and identity and the afterword by Carol Klee that ties together many issues brought up throughout the collection, the reader gains a more complete understanding of the variables that contribute to Spanish bilingualism in English-speaking societies, and by extension a more complete understanding of the dynamic nature of bilingualism in general. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together an impressive array of sociolinguistic environments while keeping the two languages constant. We hope that it marks the beginning of comparative analyses of bilingualism, acquisition outcomes, and identity construction across environments that share the same languages, but where important disparities exist in the sociolinguistic landscapes.

Sociolinguists have been pursuing connections between language and identity for several decades. But how are language and identity related in bilingualism and multilingualism? Mobilizing the most current methodology, this collection presents new research on language identity and bilingualism in three regions where Spanish coexists with other languages. The cases are Spanish-English contact in the United States, Spanish-indigenous language contact in Latin America, and Spanish-regional language contact in Spain. This is the first comparativist book to examine language and identity construction among bi- or multilingual speakers while keeping one of the languages constant. The sociolinguistic standing of Spanish varies among the three regions depending whether or not it is a language of prestige. Comparisons therefore afford a strong constructivist perspective on how linguistic ideologies affect bi/multilingual identity formation.

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends, the book presents a coherent summary of the most relevant psycholinguistic theories on language processing and bilingualism, including critical reviews to current models of lexical access, the representation of cognate words, neurolinguistic models of bilingualism, cross-linguistic effects in bimodal bilinguals (sign language), prediction processes and linguistic alignment in bilinguals, the influence of foreign-language effects in social cognition and the effects of bilingualism in emotion and decision making processing. This volume is a tribute to Prof. Costa and his work, and is born from a deep love and respect for his way of approaching the science of multilingualism from a psycholinguistic perspective.

How does knowledge of a first or second language develop, and how is that knowledge used in real time comprehension and production of one or two languages? Language development and processing are the central topics that this book explores, initially in terms of first language(s) and then in terms of additional languages. Human growth and development necessarily involve the passage of time, implicating this orthogonal factor and leading to the observation that capacities may vary across the lifespan. Two theoretical frameworks have historically attributed explanations for knowledge and use of language, nature versus nurture approaches: the former credits biogenetic intrinsic characteristics, while the latter ascribes environmental extrinsic experiences as the causes of developmental change. The evidence examined throughout this book offers a more nuanced and complex view, eschewing dichotomy and favoring a hybrid approach that takes into account a range of internal and external influences.

Biografies invisibles: Marginats i marginals és un volum que conté una sèrie d’estudis de casos concrets de personatges històrics desconeguts en gran mesura i que, pel fet d’haver tingut unes vides al marge de la llei en moltes ocasions, no són actualment coneguts. També, sobre personatges literaris que encarnen aquelles opcions no majoritàries i, encara, reflexions més genèriques sobre aquells grups o sobre els textos que ens han transmés aquelles realitats.

Biografies invisibles: Marginats i marginals conté quasi una vintena de treballs de reconeguts especialistes de diferents universitats europees, que han analitzat casos de dones marginades, homosexuals, i d’altres personatges marginals des de l’òptica actual. Es tracta de retornar-los la veu que un dia, la societat on van viure, els va negar.

Invisible Biographies: Marginates and marginals is a volume that contains a series of specific case studies of largely unknown figures from the past who, because of their lives on the fringes of the law on many occasions, were silenced. Also, on literary characters who embody those non-majority options and, in addition, more generic reflections on those groups or on the texts that have transmitted to us those polyhedral realities.

Invisible Biographies: Marginates and marginals contains almost twenty works by renowned specialists from different European universities, who have analysed the cases of marginalized women, Jews, homosexuals, and other persecuted characters from a contemporary perspective. The aim is to give them back the voice that the society in which they lived once denied them.

This is the second of two volumes – the first volume being Waltraud Brennenstuhl’s Control and Ability (P&B III:4) – treating biocybernetical questions of language. This book starts out from an investigation of the (neuro-)biological relevancy of natural language from the point of view of grammar and the lexicon. Furthermore, the basic mechanisms of the self-organization of organisms in their environments are discussed, in so far as they lead to linguistic control and abilities.

The corpus-based studies in this volume explore biomedical research writing in English from a variety of perspectives. The articles in this collection delve into the lexicographic issues involved in building an electronic database of collocations and lexical bundles, offer insight on the teaching and learning of prototypical multiword units of meaning in biomedical discourse, and view written scientific English through the lens of such diverse fields as phraseology, metaphor, gender and discourse analysis. The research presented in this book forms the theoretical and methodological foundation of SciE-Lex, a lexical database of collocations and prefabricated expressions designed to help scientists write scientific papers in English accurately. The concluding chapter on FrameNet addresses frame semantics, whose application to the cross-linguistic study of scientific language will open new and promising avenues of research in the study of specialized languages.

In the context of constantly increasing linguistic diversity in many parts of the world, opportunities and challenges arise for the acquisition of literacy skills. The successful development of literacy skills becomes a crucial prerequisite for educational attainment determining future career prospects of migrant students. Multilingual settings reveal the diversification of languages and scripts prompted in the context of migration. This monograph explores the phenomenon of biscriptuality and aims to provide an approach for investigating the development of biliteracy in the context of divergent scripts. This interdisciplinary mixed-methods study bridges intercultural education science, education research and applied linguistics for gaining a complex view on the role of biscriptuality in students’ biliteracy. It considers the extent of students’ biscriptual skills, specifies language dimensions in which the influence on biliteracy may occur, and differentiates between the effects of biscriptuality on the development of writing skills in two different genres, narrative and expository.