The author has spent a large part of his research career studying spoken language processing in bilinguals. In this chapter, he first gives a brief overview of the stages involved in speech perception and comprehension; that is, how the listener goes from the acoustic wave all the way to the interpretative representation. He then describes a number of studies he undertook that concern primarily the processing of bilingual mixed speech. The research deals with the gender marking effect (late bilinguals appear to be largely insensitive to gender congruency and incongruency), the base-language effect (in normal bilingual discourse, base‐language units – i.e. phonemes, syllables and words – are favored over guest‐language units, at least for a short period of time), and the recognition of guest words. Here, the author showed evidence for a number of effects that occur when guest words are recognized in bilingual speech, such as a language phonetic effect, a phonotactic effect, an interlanguage homophonic status effect, and a base-language effect. He ends the chapter by describing a spoken word recognition model for bilinguals that accounts for the effects found.

At the start of his career, the author was struck by the many questionable conceptions and negative attitudes that surrounded bilingualism. He addressed them in two theoretical papers, in 1985 and 1989, in which he argued that a fractional view of bilingualism had played too great a role in the field. He then expressed his own holistic view that bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one person. Instead, they are an integrated whole which cannot easily be decomposed into two separate parts. Bilinguals have a unique and specific linguistic configuration; the coexistence and constant interaction of the two languages has produced a different but complete language system. After expanding on this, the author adds a few follow-up comments to complement his view. They concern the definition of bilingualism, the language history of bilinguals, the difference between monolinguals and bilinguals, and so on. The author ends by summarizing the impact his holistic view has had over the years on theories and models of bilingualism, as well as on the use of tranlanguaging in schools, and the learning and evaluation of foreign languages.

The author has always shown interest in bilinguals who are also bicultural – also known as bicultural bilinguals. In this chapter, he concentrates on the bicultural component of these bilinguals: they take part, to varying degrees, in the life of two or more cultures; they adapt, at least in part, their attitudes, behaviors, values, languages, and so on to these cultures; and they combine and blend aspects of the cultures involved. He then evokes how one becomes bicultural and how biculturalism evolves over time. This is followed by his proposal to adapt the language mode concept to account for how biculturals modify their behaviors in different situations. Biculturals find themselves at various points along a situational continuum – cultural this time – that requires different types of behavior and attitudes depending on the situation. At one end they are in a monocultural mode, and at the other end they are in a bicultural mode. The last two sections concern bicultural identity and the question of whether bicultural bilinguals change personality when they change language.

The chapter covers special bilinguals; that is, those who have both a regular and a unique relationship with their languages. Among them, one finds bilingual writers of literature who express their art in their first language, their second or third language, or even in both their languages. There are also those who make a living from their extensive knowledge and careful use of their languages such as interpreters, translators, second-language teachers, and so on. Others, such as airline pilots and traffic controllers, or foreign correspondents, do not have to reflect on the linguistic aspect of their languages as much but depend on them, as well as on specific skills, to do their jobs. And others still owe a lot to their language proficiency and bicultural abilities to assure their safety, such as sleeper agents. All share many similarities with regular bilinguals, but they are also characterized by a number of interesting differences. The author concentrates on the latter.

The influence of one language on the other when bilinguals speak and write monolingually is an intriguing phenomenon. The author first revisits how interference has been defined over the years by major researchers. He then argues that the definitions proposed were simply too broad, and covered not only interferences but also other contact phenomena such as code-switches and borrowings. The only way to get to the bottom of this problem is to control the language mode bilinguals and language learners are in when they are being observed. In addition, he suggests that we differentiate permanent traces of one language on the other (to be called transfers) from ephemeral intrusions of the other language (these would be interferences). The author continues by describing research conducted with his colleagues on Spanish–French bilinguals in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The results obtained allowed them to have a better understanding of language restructuring in a first language. In addition, and as a by-product, it gave them a way to differentiate ephemeral intrusions from more permanent traces of the other language. He ends the chapter with a few words on bilinguals’ comprehension of speech containing cross-linguistic influences that comprise both transfers and interferences.

The careers of academics are rather straightforward, but since research on bilingualism and biculturalism have potentially important social consequences, the author communicated about them. His audience was the general public as well as professionals involved with bilingual children and adolescents. In this chapter, he describes three activities he undertook over the years. The first was to write books and articles, and give interviews, on the myths that surround bilingualism as well as on topics such as its extent, how it can be defined, having an accent in one or several languages, the personality of bilinguals, how children go in and out of bilingualism, family strategies to ensure that children become bilingual, and so on. The second activity was to have a blog on bilingualism, “Life as a Bilingual,” which was housed by a well-known social media organization, Psychology Today. The author maintained it for eleven years and it has been visited by more than 2.4 million readers. And the third activity was to defend the right of the deaf child to grow up bilingual. He wrote a position paper, which has been translated into 31 different languages. Reactions to these activities are then reviewed and discussed.

National censuses are rarely interested in those who know and use two or more languages, and they seldom make available statistics that reflect the bi- or multilingualism of their population. The author recounts how, over the years, he researched how many bilinguals there are in various countries. He contacted national statistical offices and census bureaus, studied their data, and perused national and transnational reports. He also interacted with official statisticians, who answered his questions and sent him unpublished data. And sometimes he went on specific quests to hunt down particular numbers or percentages that were being passed around. Here he concentrates on the results he obtained for the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and France. He ends with the holy grail many have been searching for – the proportion of bilinguals in the world. He gave an estimate back in 1982 – about half of the world’s population – and discusses how, with time, even 65 percent was proposed by some. Understanding why that was so was an adventure in its own right.

The author’s interest in bilinguals and bilingualism was triggered by his own bilingualism. He started on his journey in languages and cultures at the age of eight in English schools, first in Switzerland and then in England. During those ten years, he often reflected on what it means to use two or more languages in everyday life. This led him to do a Master’s thesis on bilingualism at the Sorbonne with Dounia Fourescot-Barnett. He wanted to find out about the topic and, indirectly, better understand what he was going through linguistically. A few years later, after having moved to the United States, he surveyed the field for his first book on bilingualism, Life with Two Languages. The book was organized from the macro to the micro level in six chapters: “Bilingualism in the World,” “Bilingualism in the United States,” “Bilingualism in Society,” “The Bilingual Child,” “The Bilingual Person,” and “Bilingual Speech and Language.” The book was one of the first-generation books on bilingualism that surveyed the field as it stood at the time. It was at that time that the author met Einar Haugen who befriended him and encouraged him to undertake research in the field.

This chapter focuses on early literacy acquisition as embedded in specific social contexts such as the child's home environment. During the last three decades, the role of parental support, or family support when those other than parents are involved in promoting children's literacy at home was broadly examined within a monolingual context. Concerning a bilingual context, numerous studies have shown that literacy acquisition in minority languages in a home or community setting might serve as a springboard for literacy acquisition in the second language. However, less is known on parental support of biliteracy among language-minority children. Thus, together with home support in the monolingual context, this chapter addresses research evidence on literacy practices in different languages provided by family members to children growing up in bilingual or multilingual homes. A brief overview of prominent theoretical frameworks is provided that outlines parental support and literacy development among children. In addition, drawing mainly on examples from North America, Israel, and other high-income-country contexts, research on parental support in a monolingual context is explored.

This chapter discusses core assumptions in linguistics and language acquisition regarding monolingual and bilingual linguistic knowledge and presents a typology of native speakers that includes heritage speakers. Both layman and academic definitions of a native speaker are discussed, as well as recent research on individual differences in monolingually-raised native speakers related to level of education and other variables that are also relevant for an understanding of heritage speakers. The second introduces the concepts of bilingual and multilingual native speakers and balanced bilingualism, addressing the specific cultural, attitudinal, affective, and sociopolitical factors that affect the acquisition of a heritage language. Heritage speakers’ shift in language dominance with the onset of schooling in the majority language, if not earlier, contributes significantly to reduction in heritage language input and opportunities to use the language at a critical time for language development in childhood. Despite showing obvious changes in some aspects of their grammars, heritage speakers retain native-like abilities in several other aspects, compared to second language learners. The focus of this chapter, and of this book, is more on similarities and differences between heritage speakers and monolingually-raised native speakers than on what heritage speakers and second language learners tend to share.

Chapter 29 examines the recurring attributes in current definitions of HL learners. These include early and significant exposure to the HL, proficiency in the HL, bilingualism to some degree, dominance in a language other than the HL, and an ethnic/cultural connection to the HL. From sociolinguistic journey, Korean heritage language (KHL) learners often end up with high receptive language skill, low to moderate accuracy in their speaking, and zero metalinguistic knowledge, and consequently enroll in Korean language in college to (re)learn their HL language. This poses pedagogical challenges, as KHL learners are linguistically distinguished from L2 learners due to their language experience. This chapter explores issues in language acquisition, language attrition, and language processing of Korean-English bilingual children and how such experience sheds light in understanding the pedagogical issues related to the language processing of young adult KHL learners.

This study analyzes the use of general extenders in recorded conversations in English and Spanish between nine pairs of young adult Spanish–English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona. Building on previous studies in both languages, 325 tokens of general extenders were analyzed quantitatively according to frequency, length in words, and function (referential or non–referential), as well as the gender and language dominance of participants. It was expected that general extenders would be susceptible to borrowing in a language contact situation since discourse–pragmatic features often appear on the periphery of grammar and are detachable. However, in the speech of the same Spanish–English bilinguals, contact with English did not appear to influence the use of general extenders in Spanish. No English forms of general extenders were found in Spanish. Moreover, general extenders in Spanish were significantly longer and were used to fulfill referential functions more often than general extenders in English. As the first study to analyze the use of general extenders in English and Spanish in the speech of the same bilinguals, these results underline the ability of bilinguals to both understand and reproduce the subtleties of the use of these features in the two languages they speak.