Cross-language Effects in Biliteracy

Introduction The creativity of human beings expresses itself in as many forms as there are human activities and artifacts — not only in the media of arts and language, but also in the choices people make for personal and social expression in everyday life. Where two or more spoken or written codes are widely known and used within one community, speakers and writers can draw on differences in their formal properties, semantics, and symbolic associations to produce a range of expressive effects which involve the differential and contrastive meaning potential of the available languages (Auer, 1984; Gumperz, 1982; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Pennington, 1994). These are not merely additive effects — the expansion of the bilingual’s expressive repertoire — but rather transforming effects: the cross-fertilisation and cross-coding of different representations of reality. These transforming cross-language effects of dual-code or multi-code use, which are manifested in different forms of processing and structuring of language and of information more generally, have a cognitive impact on language users in relation to both the encoding and the decoding of ideas through language. In children, bilingualism is associated with cognitive growth (Diaz & Klingler, 1991; Johnson, 1991) and with the development of abilities in: