To begin this post with a little personal information, I was born in the United States but started out by learning Korean. That may seem odd, but I was an only child who lived with parents that normally spoke Korean in the house. I read a lot of Korean picture books when I was a kid. Thus, it was only natural that I became more familiar with Korean than English at the time. So, according to my mom, when I first went to kindergarten, I took extra classes. However, as I spent more time in school, with friends, and surrounded by books that were in English, I grew much more accustomed to English, quickly surpassing my Korean. English was the language I would speak in, think in, and practically do everything else in. Then, in the middle of fourth grade, I moved to South Korea. At first, I could barely understand what the kids around me were saying or what the teacher was talking about. But miraculously, as I continuously studied and participated in classes in Korean, my skills in the language improved. By the time I was in fifth grade, I was using Korean fluently and had no problem in understanding classes or taking tests. Currently, I’m as comfortable with Korean as English. Because of this kind of experience throughout my life, I wanted to learn more about what it means, in psycholinguistic terms, to be bilingual.
Bilinguals have more entries in their mental lexicon, or “mental dictionary”. Based on an article from The Conversation, in psycholinguistics, the mental lexicon is the collection of the words we know and their characteristics. Thus, it is only natural that bilinguals have more information in their mental lexicon because it contains knowledge from two different languages. The article further explains how there are two main theories on how people who are bilingual process information. According to the “language-selective access” hypothesis, bilinguals access information by switching from one language to the other. Therefore, if one language is used, the other is suppressed. On the other hand, the second theory which is the “language-nonselective access” hypothesis states that the two languages influence each other and help recognize a word in one of the languages. So, when a new language is being acquired, the other language is used as the foundation. As one grows more comfortable with the new language, the other language becomes less necessary in using it.
I personally believe that these hypotheses are both true. Even before I moved to South Korea, I was familiar, to some point, with both English and Korean. So, when understanding speech or writing, I switched between English and Korean without necessarily having to translate one to the other. When I was producing my own words, however, I found myself stringing up words in English first and translating them to Korean. This made my speaking and writing, while grammatically correct, rather unnatural. But now, accustomed to the Korean language, I no longer need to translate from English to produce sentences in Korean. When I need to use Korean, I feel my thought process switch completely to the language, and I am able to speak, write, read, and understand directly without any sort of translation. The same is also the case with English.
To sum up, when I was completely comfortable with one language and only somewhat familiar with another, the “language-selective access” hypothesis applied to “passive” processes like listening and reading, while the “language-nonselective access” hypothesis applied to “active” processes like speaking and writing. On the other hand, when both languages became natural to me, the “language-selective access” hypothesis applied completely. Thus, the more comfortable one becomes with a language, the more he/she moves from language-nonselective access to language-selective access. Adding on from this simple idea, though, I think we also need to understand the two theories in more detail by dividing language processes into passive processes (like listening and reading which simply require the person to understand what is given to them) and active processes (like speaking and writing which go further and require the person to produce their own words). So, when one first learns a language, he/she starts off with language-nonselective access with both passive and active processes. As the person improves his/her skills, passive processes occur through language-selective access while active processes continue to occur through language-nonselective access. The method of access for active processes takes more time to convert because they call for more mental effort than passive processes. When both processes can occur through language-selective access, this is the point when he/she truly becomes fluent in both languages.
Of course, this is just my own hypothesis derived from a little research and my own experience with language. I’m curious as to whether others who also have experiences with multiple languages have gone through similar processes or completely different ones. Perhaps if we put the experiences of various people together, we could learn more about the process of acquiring a language.
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