Language Selection in Bilingual Speakers: A multidisciplinary Approach

This paper aimed to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to investigate language selection in bilingual speech production.The present paper first reviews the sociolinguistic aspects of bilingual language choice, moves on to investigate the notion of language choice presented in the models of bilingual language production and comprehension, and view different factors a single window into the bilingual language selection and finally examines language choice in dialogue. I examined models of bilingual language production in order to provide a better understanding of bilingual language selection.When language choice is formulated, information about language is included in the preverbal message at the conceptual level in order to channel the preverbal message into the intended language. This study suggests that as bilingual language selection is highly affected by the context, language tag specification is formulated outside the language system and the output is sent to the conceptualiser level where it is included in the preverbal message.Language cue may have various values depending on the linguistic context. In a bilingual mode or a dense switch context, the value of language cue is not very high. Information about language choice at the higher level of processing, language membership information,and language nodes at the lower level of processing construct a language information network that regulates bilingual language processing. Language selection in dialogue settings was also discussed. This study suggests that bilinguals may not formulate a language choice for every utterance they produce during a course of dialogue or when there is a language history between the two participants.

Keywords:

bilingual language selection , language tag , language cue , language node , bilingual language information network