Biscriptality: a neglected construct in the study of bilingualism

Vaid, Jyotsna

doi:10.1007/s41809-022-00101-3

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our lab-based studies need to take it to the streets in order to avoid the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) biased samples that dominate most studies; 18–24-year-old undergraduate students are not representative of most populations. As an example, Vaid (2022), focusing on biscriptal bilinguals, reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of this disconnect between the typical bilingual research participant and the typical bilingual. This systematic profiling and selection of the “ideal” speakers for experimental studies, we argue, perpetuates ableist stereotypes (i.e., by focusing on the oral-auditory modality, and consistently excluding other modalities), reinforces monolingual/monocultural norms, promotes the study of well-represented, mostly Indo-European languages in occidental contexts, evokes labels and terminology that may be characterized as neo-racist (Holliday, 2017), and consequently, invests the broadly understood language acquisition field with questionable practices that contribute to the marginalization of already underrepresented groups (Dewaele et al, 2022).…”

Section: Setting the Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward

Leivada

Rodríguez‐Ordóñez

Couto

et al. 2023

Applied Psycholinguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper addresses several problematic scientific practices in psycholinguistic research. We discuss challenges that arise when working with minority languages, such as the notion of monolingual/monocultural normality and its historical origins, the stereotype of native-speakerism, the quest for testing people who fit specific profiles, the implications of the policy that urges scholars to match bilingual groups to monolingual comparison groups, and the use of powerful theoretical narratives that may evoke problematic labels and ableist terminology. These issues invest the field of psycholinguistics with questionable practices that contribute to the marginalization of groups that do not tick the standard normative boxes. Surveying some of the most widespread scientific practices in the field of psycholinguistics, our emphasis is on how several processes and policies may embody stereotypes that contribute to the exclusion of certain groups from the scientific literature, with grievous consequences for the visibility and the representation of some minoritized languages.

show abstract

Section: Setting the Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward

Leivada

Rodríguez‐Ordóñez

Couto

et al. 2023

Applied Psycholinguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The ability to write in different scripts or commonly referred to as biscriptality, is an example of a neglected understanding of bilingualism that is believed to be cognitively rewarding for multilingual learners [112]. We thereby suggest that writing in different scripts brings an added value to becoming bilingual and improving metalinguistic skills across one's linguistic repertoire.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Cognitive Learning and Robotics: Innovative Teaching for Inclusivity

Oralbayeva

Amirova

CohenMiller

et al. 2022

MTI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present the interdisciplinary CoWriting Kazakh project in which a social robot acts as a peer in learning the new Kazakh Latin alphabet, to which Kazakhstan is going to shift from the current Kazakh Cyrillic by 2030. We discuss the past literature on cognitive learning and script acquisition in-depth and present a theoretical framing for this study. The results of word and letter analyses from two user studies conducted between 2019 and 2020 are presented. Learning the new alphabet through Kazakh words with two or more syllables and special native letters resulted in significant learning gains. These results suggest that reciprocal Cyrillic-to-Latin script learning results in considerable cognitive benefits due to mental conversion, word choice, and handwriting practices. Overall, this system enables school-age children to practice the new Kazakh Latin script in an engaging learning scenario. The proposed theoretical framework illuminates the understanding of teaching and learning within the multimodal robot-assisted script learning scenario and beyond its scope.

show abstract

“…Many of the research questions, designs, theories, and models that drive research are essentially Eurocentric and may hardly be relevant to other major orthographic contexts (Padakannaya & Mohanty, 2004;Vaid & Padakannaya, 2004;Winskel & Padakannaya, 2014). Research related to the third question too is impacted by the dominance of western alphabetic perspectives that need to be addressed (Vaid, 2022).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some papers deal with a single script but highlight the specific features of the script in question and their cognitive-linguistic implications (i.e., papers by Bae et al, 2022;Inoue et al, 2022;Labusch et al, 2022;Yin et al, 2022) while some compare the scriptspecific influences on cognition across two or more scripts (i.e., papers by Georgiou et al, 2022;Mirza & Gottardo, 2022;Winskel & Perea, 2022). There are two non-empirical papers one on the 'script relativity hypothesis' (Pae, 2022) and another on 'biscriptality' (Vaid, 2022). Vaid's paper highlights the need for moving beyond the monoscriptal Eurocentric bias to a cross-linguistic, non-alphabetic biscriptal approach to gain a better understanding of bilingual word recognition and lexical representation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%