bilingualism

[Brian MacWhinney]

Folks,
    The biling mailing list from Arizona provides an excellent forum
for discussion of bilingualism, including pedagogical issues and book
notices.   However, I would certainly hope that discussion of issues
in the area of childhood bilingualism could continue in full force on
info-childes too.  I doubt that becoming a bilingual and becoming a
monolingual involve two entirely different processes.  Of course the
timing of the onset of bilingualism has a big effect on the outcome,
but I would not want to think that a child who begins learning a
second language at 4 learns in some fundamentally different way from
a child who begins at birth. Nor would I want to think that becoming
a multilingual involves yet another otherwise unutilized
psychological facility or module.
    A somewhat sharper line can perhaps be drawn between explicit
classroom learning and more implicit learning in context.  But even
these boundaries are hard to draw in practice, since the outcomes of
explicit learning can often overlap with those of implicit learning.
    So, my vote is for the ongoing exploration of ways in which all
of the various forms of bilingualism, multilingualism, and
monolingualism emerge from a common set of basic human learning
capacities and the nature of the human mind.  If that tends to make
the subject matter for info-childes a bit broad, I doubt if many of
us will be unhappy about that.

--Brian MacWhinney