Abstract
“Don’t judge a book by its cover”: Why the use of eye-tracking is useful in the investigation of bilingual children’s conceptualization
While previous studies on bilingual children have mostly focused on morpho-syntactic phenomena (cf., Engemann, 2022), in this talk I focus on the importance of additionally investigating their conceptualization. Around the world – also in Norway – people get discriminated or judged because of their linguistic behavior or “shortcomings” (as discussed by Olszewska & Opsahl, 2024). In other words, people get judged based on their linguistic performance, or “surface language”.
In the talk, I present a study on how simultaneous bilingual Norwegian-English children conceptualize goal-oriented motion events in their two languages, which have different, and partly conflicting, language-specific conceptualization patterns (Andresen, Delucchi & Mertins, submitted). Are the bilingual children able to acquire two different perspectivations of the same event – and what do the results tell us about the relation between “surface language” and conceptual competence? I show the significance of using methodologies such as eye-tracking and memory tests in addition to the linguistic data – to be able to “look under the surface” – and to tell a different story of children's bilingualism.
References:
Andresen, H., Delucchi Danhier, R., & Mertins, B. (submitted). Dominant-while-speaking. How Norwegian-English children conceptualize motion events.
Engemann, H. (2022). How (not) to cross a boundary: Crosslinguistic influence in simultaneous bilingual children’s event construal. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 25, 42–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000298
Olszewska, A., & Opsahl, T. (2024). “If you don’t speak Norwegian well, they think you are stupid”: Experiencing and responding to linguistic racism by Polish migrant workers in Norway. Multilingualism Research Forum (2024-04-05), MultiLing, University of Oslo.