This 53rd collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-
Discuss the following statement:
“The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.”
(From Grosjean, F. (1989). “Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.” Brain and Language, 36(1), 3-15.)
I agree with the statement. The bilingual is of course not from two monolinguals. It means that they are distinct from each other.
Monolinguals are people who are proficient with their language, for example like English people, who are good at communication because they are native speakers. This statement is true, because a bilingual is unstable with the two languages.
I disagree. The reason why is because it is possible for a person as human being who is able to be called two monolinguals or bilingual person. One parent can speak English and the other Spainese, and so on so forth.
Theoretically, children can be raised bilingually and monolingually in an account for the family settings they are living in, although the languages they use will have different sound repertoires. However, I believe that children who live in a family that parents and grandparents speak different languages would sound like bilinguals.
This is true, because it is impossible to learn two languages at the same time. One always comes before the other, and this language always becomes the strong language, so a child cannot be two monolinguals at the same time.
First of all, bilinguals are not two different languages used in different occasions. Bilinguals are not two monolinguals because the language they use is not two different languages, but they think that the language they use is only one language. They can use it as a single language uniformedly in their community.
I agree. One person can exactly learn more than one language. Some people say that bilingual children start off with one system. It can be said from this statement that balanced bilingual is important.
This is true because people can be monolingual or multibilingual. For example, if the mother always speaks French to the child and the father speaks English, both French and English are their monolinguals. In that case, monolingualism and bilingualism are balanced. So it can make sense that two monolinguals is bilingual: their two single languages, monolinguals, become bilingual.
I don’t agree, because a child can learn two languages spontaneously or sequentially. Moreover, a simultaneous bilingual is a person who can use two languages at the same time.
I agree. When a child start acquiring a language, he would use a lot of hypotheses to test if they are understood. Then he would give up those not understood and preserve the vice versa. In this way, no matter how many languages the child is learning, the child would learn the languages independently of each other, like a monolingual.
This is not true, because two monolinguals have to be acquired by two persons.
More to come...