[SOUND] When we look at the smaller pieces of language, at the forms of a particular word, those tend to be less connected. And when we look at the concepts that are represented, those tend to be more similar across languages. The disconnection between higher level concepts and lower level forms takes on an interesting view when we think about it within the bilingual literature. There've been a series of studies done in my laboratory and other laboratories such as that by Tamar Golan. And also brought up by a former graduate student of mine named Austin who asked, well, how can it be that there are these different forms of proficiency, that there are these people that sound very native like, and have a certain proficiency level, and other people who don't sound native like, and also have a pretty high proficiency level? What a, what does that mean? Well, it been observed in my lab, and the labs of Golan and colleagues, is that bilinguals show this form of reversed dominance. Now we're talking about a specific group of bilinguals, what are called early sequential bilinguals, bilinguals who speak a native language at home, and are exposed to English when they go to school here in the US. There's a very large portion of Spanish speaking children who enter school and learn English at school, and when they arrive at college, they're actually better in English than they are in Spanish, so their language dominance is reversed. Lynette and her family had moved to Argentina before she came back to the US, and went to graduate school. So Lynette had observed the effects on herself, right? Where she began to speak Spanish had given presentations i, in Argentina about her work. And she'd also seen the effects on her children. Her youngest son had been born in Argentina and lived there til about age three. Her older daughter was a child when they moved to Argentina and had lived there until about age 10 or 11. And the differences were interesting. Her older daughter had much more knowledge of the language, and her younger son had a much better accent. In fact, many times people would call Spanish speakers would call the home the son would answer the phone and this was already back in the US after many years, and he'd been quite young when they came back from Argentina. And so he would, say something like [FOREIGN] and his accent was so good that then everybody on the other side of the phone would start speaking to him very quickly. And, of course, he didn't speak Spanish and so he'd have to very quickly pass the phone off, to some other family member but his accent was so good that they thought he was a native speaker. When the Lynette came back to graduate school she thought a lot about, what does this mean? And she ran into a literature by James Cummins, from the 1980's in which he makes this distinction between two different types of language, what's called basic intercommunication skills or BICS and cognitive and academic language which is called CALP for cognitive and academic language performance. This distinction between BICS and CALP, helped Lynette understand what had happened with her children. The fact that you could have someone with very, very good knowledge of the sounds of a language, and they could sound like a native and you could have someone with less knowledge of the sounds, more of an accent, but more knowledge of the language itself. She suggested that this BICS/CALP distinction, the difference between basic every day language and academic language, would help to distinguish and explain a lot of what happens in the bilingual literature. THe fact that you can have late learners who acquire a language and have very, very thick accents, and yet, be incredibly proficient. Conrad's English was so bad, his spoken English was so bad, that people could not stand listening to him. And yet, he's considered one of the best writers of the English literature to this day, but his native language was Polish. He did learn French as a teenager and actually had a pretty good accent in French, but his English came much later in life and he had a very ho, strong and profound accent and yet was an excellent writer. And I think this also points to Lynette's idea of the fact that proficiency can be split across these different domains. That you can have very, very good cognitive and academic language proficiency, but not such good basic intercommunication skills. That those two things are different, and that's what Cummins brought up in the literature and when Lynette resonated towards when she considered her experience. Cummings noted that some studies showed a dissociation between these two different types of language use. So if we looked at spontaneous language use, studies that looked at this didn't find any connection between that, and how they did on language proficiency test, or language test. The BICS/ CALP distinction also fits in nicely with Crolls model, right in that model we had two different stores for the words in each language and a shared conceptual store. Well, if we think about the shared conceptual store, that in some ways, is like an academic type of store. And, the basic intercommunication skills or how you express that in a particular language, can be contained within each lexicon, within each word store.
