Peal and Lambert s Legacy: The Canadian Breakthrough in

1
Peal and Lamberts Legacy

• The Canadian Breakthrough
• in Bilingual Research

Amelia Mareva
5th
International Conference New Bulgarian
University
of Central European Canadianists


2009
2
Contemporary context

• Bilingualism/multilingualism
• a major fact of life in the world today (Bhatia
  Ritchie 2004)
• far from being exceptional is a problem which
  affects the majority of the worlds population
  (Mackey 1967)
• exists in nearly all countries of the world
  (Grosjean 1982)
• the majority of the worlds population is
  bilingual (DeBot 1992)
• an increasing number of children grow with
  bilingualism as a first language (Hakuta 1986)
• two-thirds of the worlds children grow in a
  bilingual environment (Crystal 1997)
• there is a real sense in which a monolingual
  person, with a monolingual temperament, is
  disadvantaged or deprived (Crystal 2000)
• the doom of monolingualism (Graddol 2006)
• monolingualism is an aberration, an affliction of
  the powerful (Edwards 2004)

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Theoretical context

• Bilingual research
• Has grown dramatically worldwide, especially in
  Canada, Belgium, South Africa, the USA, etc.
• The concept one nation one language lost its
  relevance in linguistics the point of reference
  is no longer the ideal monolingual
  speaker/listener (Romaine 1989)
• Bilingualism defined a complex concept with
  open-ended semantics (Beardsmore 1986)
  Bloomfield 1933, Haugen 1953, Weinreich 1953
• The debate on the positive and negative effects
  of bilingualism
• Early studies retarded, confused,
  feeble-minded, handicapped in their mental
  growth (Saer 1924, Goodenough 1926, Thomson 1952)
• If it were possible for a child to live in two
  languages, at once equally well, so
  much the worse. His intellectual and spiritual
  growth would not thereby be doubled,
  but halved (Laurie 1893 18)
• Peal and Lamberts watershed paper favourable
  cognitive and socio-cultural consequences of
  bilingualism
• Modern perspectives Bilingualism is viewed as a
  factor of cultural enrichment, a valuable
  intellectual and societal asset

4
Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lamberts The
Relation of Bilingualism to Intelligence (1962)

• A bilingual child is
• a youngster whose wider experiences in
  two cultures have given him advantages which a
  monolingual does not enjoy. Intellectually his
  experience with two language systems seems to
  have left him with a mental flexibility, a
  superiority in concept formation, a more
  diversified set of mental abilities There is
  no question about the fact that he is superior
  intellectually. In contrast, a monolingual
  appears to have a more unitary structure of
  intelligence which he must use for all types of
  intellectual tasks (Peal and Lambert 196220)

5
The Canadian backdrop

• The twentieth century belongs to Canada (Wilfrid
  Laurier, PM, 1904)
• Socio-political context redefining the role of
  French Canadians
• The Quiet Revolution (19601966) rejection of
  traditional values les trois dominantes de la
  pensée canadienne-française lagriculturisme, le
  messianisme et lanti-étatisme (Michel Brunet)
• the Official Languages Act (1969)
• Academic climate
• The era of the cognitive sixties
• Study of bilingualism has been a respectable and
  theoretically profitable enterprise in Canadian
  psychological circles. Canadian researchers are
  confronted with bilingualism even in their own
  homes, as their children attempt to struggle with
  bilingualism (Hakuta 1988 304)
• W. Lambert father of research on
  bilingualism

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The experiment

• Subjects number, age, gender, class, proficiency
• Two groups of 110 ten-year old fourth-graders
  from six middle-class French schools in Montreal
  with a gender ration of six boys to four girls
  balanced French-English bilinguals and French
  monolinguals
• Testing instruments verbal and non-verbal IQ
  tests language tasks and self-rating
• Results Bilinguals scored higher than
  monolinguals on 15 out of 18 measures no
  significant difference on the remaining three
  measures.

7
Methodological breakthrough

• Peal and Lambert rectified many of the
  methodological weaknesses of the previous
  studies (Baker and Sienkewicz 2000 69)
• More rigorous criteria for sampling and control
  of the variables involved aiming to to match the
  groups on as many features known or suspected to
  correlate with intelligence as possible (Peal
  Lambert 1962)
• socioeconomic status of the comparison groups
  educational background (the same French school
  system), similar socioeconomic background
  (relatively affluent middle-class Francophones, a
  linguistically rich environment)
• linguistic proficiency true, balanced
  bilinguals vs. pseudobilinguals
• battery of testing instruments
• language proficiency The Word association test,
  the Word detection test, Peabody vocabulary tests
• intelligence standardized in the native
  language of the subject Lavoie-Laurendau test,
  Raven Progressive Matrices Test, Thurstone
  Primary Mental Abilities Test and subjects
  school grades
• attitude questionnaires, self-ratings

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Theoretical contribution (1)

• Bilingualism and intelligence
• more diversified structure of intelligence
  greater cognitive flexibility, creativity and
  divergent thought
• greater role of language(s) in structuring
  intelligence
• better at reorganizing visual patterns and better
  equipped to solve mental problems
• greater metasemiotic and metalinguistic awareness
• Research after 1962 has tended to move away from
  the monistic notion of IQ to the pluralistic
  notion of a multi-component view of intelligence
  and cognition (Baker 1988 20)

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Theoretical contribution (2)

• Code switching the alternation two languages
  within a single discourse.
• Bilinguals typically acquire experience in
  switching from one language to another, possibly
  trying to solve a problem while thinking in one
  language, and then when blocked, switching to the
  other. This habit, if it were developed, could
  help them in their performance on tests
  requiring symbolic reorganization since they
  demand a readiness to drop one hypothesis or
  concept and try another. (Peal and Lambert
  196214)
• flexibility in tasks requiring conceptual
  reorganization (thinking about things in a new
  way)
• increased capacity for communication (signaling
  membership in a group, maintaining group
  cohesiveness, but also a sign of language
  interference)

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The impact (1)

• Research
• 1970s
• Lambert 1972, 1976 first neurophysiological
  studies social psychology of language
• Liedtke and Nielson 1968, Bain 1974 confirm the
  findings in other parts of Canada
• Ianco-Worrall 1972 the relationship between
  object-naming ability and bilingualism
• Ben-Zeev 1977 bilinguals superiority in
  conceptualizing linguistic rules
• Cummins 1976, 1978 threshold level of
  competence the interdependence hypothesis
• Duncan and De Avila 1979 positive correlation
  between linguistic proficiency and bilingualism
• 1980s
• Diaz 1983, Gardner 1983 Cummins 1984, Mclaughlin
  1984, Bain and Yu 1989
• 1989 The McGill Conference in Honour of Wallace
  E. Lambert
• Present day Bialystok 2001, Baker 2001, Cummins
  2001

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The impact (2)

• Education
• Mid-1960s - Lambert and Tucker pioneered the
  development of Canadas first second language
  immersion programme the Canadian model of
  bilingual education (innovative programme in
  which the French language was used as a medium of
  instruction for elementary school students whose
  home language was English)
• Students in bilingual immersion programs have
  scored as well as their non-bilingual peers in
  tests of their common language, but much higher
  in the second (minority or foreign) language.
• Students in bilingual programs have greater
  metalinguistic awareness than monolingual
  students. For example, young children are more
  aware that the name of something is simply a
  convention of language it is not an inherent
  property of the thing itself. They understand
  that a language is an arbitrary system that
  there is no right language against which other
  languages can be judged. This is an essential
  awareness in a multilingual and multicultural
  world.

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List of selected references

• Baker, Colin, (2001). Foundations of Bilingual
  Education and Bilingualism. Multilingual Matters.
• Baker, Colin and Anne Sienkewicz, (2000). The
  Care and Education of Young Bilinguals.
  Multilingual Matters.
• Bhatia, Tej K. and Ritchie, William C, (2004).
  Handbook of Bilingualism. Oxford Blackwell
  Publishing.
• Bialystok, Ellen, ( 2001) Bilingualism in
  Development Language, Literacy and Cognition,
  CUP.
• Crystal, David, (2000) Language Death. CUP.
• Cummins, Jim, (1976). The Influence of
  Bilingualism on Cognitive Growth A Synthesis of
  Research Findings and Explanatory Hypothesis.
  Working Papers on Bilingualism, 9, 1-43
• Graddol, David, (2006). English Next, British
  Council, UK, http//www.britishcouncil.org/files/d
  ocuments/learning-research-english-next.pdf
• Hakuta, Kenji, (1986) The Mirror of Language The
  Debate on Bilingualism. New York Basic Books.
• Hakuta, Kenji, Bernardo M. Ferdman and Rafael M.
  Diaz, (1987). Bilingualism and cognitive
  development Three perspectives. In S. Rosenberg
  (Ed.), Advances in applied psycholinguistics,
  vol. II Reading, writing and language learning,
  284-319. CUP.
• Ianco-Worrall Anita D., (1972). Bilingualism and
  cognitive development. Child Development, 43,
  1390-1400
• Laurie, S. S., (1893). Lectures on Language and
  Linguistic Method in the School. University of
  Edinburgh. http//www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/f
  lippy.php?idlanguagelinguist00laur
• Peal, Elizabeth and Lambert, Wallace, (1962). The
  Relation of Bilingualism to Intelligence,
  Psychological Monographs, 76, 123.
• Reynolds, Allan, (1991). Bilingualism,
  Multuculturalism and Second Language Learning
  The McGill Conference in Honour of Wallace E.
  Lambert (ed) Allan G. Reynolds, Lawrence Erlbaum
  Associates.
• Romaine, Suzanne, (1995). Bilingualism, Blackwell
  Publishing.
• Weinreich, Uriel, (1953). Languages in Contact
  Findings and Problems. New York Linguistic
  Circle