Media pressures on Welsh language preservation

Despite compulsory school instruction in the Welsh language and strong cultural incentives to acquire the language, the most recent UK Census showed a downward trend in the number of speakers. The asymmetry in explicit language acquisition incentives is here considered to be offset by the media dominance of the English language. This dominance is modeled by the introduction of time-dependent connectivity and infectivity among English speakers into an adapted epidemiological model. Extrapolations up to 2050 are made, this being the announced date of a Welsh Assembly language-planning target of one million Welsh speakers.     

Fundamental Frequency in Monolingual English, Bilingual English/Russian, and Bilingual English/Cantonese Young Adult Women

Mean F0 of nine young adult English/Russian female bilinguals and nine young adult English/Cantonese female bilinguals were examined from samples of connected speech in each language. Mean F0 were compared in each language and in English with those of a monolingual English control group of ten young adult female speakers. Acoustic measurements were analyzed with the Kay Elemetrics Multispeech program (Kay Elemetrics, Lincoln Park, NJ). The results indicate that the English/Russian bilinguals consistently had a higher mean F0 in Russian than in English. Mean F0 did not change with language switch for the English/Cantonese speakers. There were no significant differences between the groups in their English production. Clinical implications regarding norms for both monolingual and bilingual persons, as well as implications for understanding the nature of bilingualism, in particular code-switching, are discussed.     

The bilingual brain: Flexibility and control in the human cortex

The goal of the present review is to discuss recent cognitive neuroscientific findings concerning bilingualism. Three interrelated questions about the bilingual brain are addressed: How are multiple languages represented in the brain? how are languages controlled in the brain? and what are the real-world implications of experience with multiple languages? The review is based on neuroimaging research findings about the nature of bilingual processing, namely, how the brain adapts to accommodate multiple languages in the bilingual brain and to control which language should be used, and when. We also address how this adaptation results in differences observed in the general cognition of bilingual individuals. General implications for models of human learning, plasticity, and cognitive control are discussed.