Limits on bilingualism
Publication year
1989Source
Nature, 340, 6230, (1989), pp. 229-230ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
SW OZ DCC CO
Journal title
Nature
Volume
vol. 340
Issue
iss. 6230
Page start
p. 229
Page end
p. 230
Abstract
Speech, in any language, is continuous; speakers provide few reliable cues to the boundaries of words, phrases, or other meaningful units. To understand speech, listeners must divide the continuous speech stream into portions that correspond to such units. This segmentation process is so basic to human language comprehension that psycholinguists long assumed that all speakers would do it in the same way. In previous research, however, we reported that segmentation routines can be language-specific: speakers of French process spoken words syllable by syllable, but speakers of English do not. French has relatively clear syllable boundaries and syllable-based timing patterns, whereas English has relatively unclear syllable boundaries and stress-based timing; thus syllabic segmentation would work more efficiently in the comprehension of French than in the comprehension of English. Our present study suggests that at this level of language processing, there are limits to bilingualism: a bilingual speaker has one and only one basic language.
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- Faculty of Social Sciences [27108]
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