[SOUND] We could also ask how people transition from everyday language to academic language. Lynnette Austin, a former graduate student of mine, asked this question in her dissertation. She wanted to know what kinds of processing is more sensitive to when a person learns a language, and which ones are more sensitive to how well they speak it. So she took a group of Spanish-English bilingual adults who varied in when they had learned their second language, English. And also varied, of course, in how well they spoke each language. And, the ideas that she wanted to explore was this idea of BICS and CALP. The fact that you could have someone who had relatively strong CALP right, academic language. In fact she's, she noted that there were several professors that she knew personally that had very high CALP. They obviously wrote English, they could communicate very effectively in English, but they also had very strong accents. So even though it looked like they had bad BICS right, their basic intercommunication skills were not as developed as a native speaker. Their CALP, their cognitive and academic language, was highly developed. So in this group of bilinguals, she'd sought aspects of language that might distinguish these two factors. For BICS, for things that were inter-communicative, she sought things like looking at accent, or maybe looking at very simple type of grammatical processing. Things like, the simple present. For CALP, she thought, what if we introduced more complex types of processing so we could look at something like picture vocabulary? Of course, we realize that that relies on meaning as we've talked before, this idea that if someone is more proficient in a language, they'll be able to process meaning better than if they're less proficient. But she also looked for aspects of grammar that might be more complex. So very complex verbs in Spanish, for example, the subjunctive, which is quite difficult because in some cases goes against the simple past. But in any case, by looking at the simple and complex verbs, both in English and Spanish, by looking at things like accent and picture vocabulary, she could start to look at which of these factors would be affected by how well somebody spoke a language and when they had learned it. And what she found was quite interesting. She found that when you look at things like accent or simple verbs, there's a very strong correlation between when somebody learns a language and how well they process these types of information, what their accent is like. Accent is highly tied to when somebody learns a second language. The later they learn it, the stronger the accent. It's not an absolute rule. There are exceptions, but it's a general trend. In terms of complex verbs, things like the subjunctive in Spanish or the past tense in English, and specifically the past tense seemed to separate. So there's been a lot of work done on the past tense looking at regular and irregular past tense. Things like jump, jumped or things like seek, sought, right? And there's been a lot of discussion about these being handled by different brain systems. Again, this is not absolutely nailed down in stone. There is debate about what the true difference is between regulars and irregulars, but no matter who's done this research, there is agreement that the regulars and irregulars are different. Acquisition of irregular verbs occurs later. Generally there are many errors produced by young children which then resolve over time. Even as late as seven and eight there can still be errors in typically developing monolinguals, in producing the irregular past tense. And the regular past tense is learned quite early. What Lynette found was that age of acquisition correlated with this. The regular past tense, the ed, jump, jumped, that correlated with age of acquisition. But the irregular past tense correlated with how well somebody had academic language performance. In this case, something like picture vocabulary correlates with the irregular past tense. Same with the complex verbs in Spanish. And interestingly, when she looked at the correlation across languages between these inter-communication skills, and across languages, between academic language, she found that academic language correlated quite strongly across both languages. And this fits in nicely with Crowell's idea that the conceptual space, the conceptual part of language is shared across languages. And so when you look at academic language, a lot of that information is shared. A concept is a concept, and it may get different labels. It may have different verb reflections in terms of conjugations or endings in Spanish and English, but the concepts themselves are highly correlated. And those people who had high academic language in one language tended to have high academic language in the other language.
