Advances in the Study of Bilingualism

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Foreword

Fred Genesee

Advances in the Study of Bilingualism illustrates the power of cross-disciplinary
research paradigms in unravelling the complexities of bilingualism. Most
researchers of bilingualism work within one, or sometimes two, research
paradigms – for example, linguistics and psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics
and educational psychology, or behavioural and neuro-cognitive. But, the true
richness of the phenomena associated with bilingualism can only be revealed
by researchers who, collectively, use different and multiple approaches of inves-
tigation. As an object of scientific investigation, language even in its simplest
monolingual forms stands out because of the diversity of perspectives that
can and have been brought to bear on it. Surely, this reflects the central role
that language plays in human society as well as in human development and
functioning. The complexity of the research endeavour when it comes to
understanding bilingualism is magnified, in turn, by the fact that human
development itself is remarkably complex – entailing cognitive, social, emo-
tional, and educational aspects of development, among others, not to mention
functional differences between infants/toddlers, children, adults, and people
of advanced age. All of these dimensions of human development and func-
tioning implicate different questions and issues, different methodologies, dif-
ferent technical and analytic approaches, and different challenges. This is no
less true for the study of bilingualism. In fact, the study of bilingualism impli-
cates the sum total of the complexity of monolingualism along with unique
aspects of becoming and being bilingual.
Indeed, the contributions to this volume focus largely on issues that are
unique to becoming and being bilingual and living in bilingual communities.
In particular, they focus largely on possible interactions between the two
languages of bilinguals and how behavioral and neuro-cognitive relationships
between the two languages of bilinguals might be shaped by educational,
community, and other factors. To be more specific, Gathercole, Pérez-Tattam,
Stadthagen-González and Thomas examine interactions between Welsh and
English in semantic and morphosyntactic domains in young simultaneous