On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 22:17, Colin Wright
<colin.wright@denbridgemarine.com> wrote:
Most would accept that words in one's native langauge often
carry additional "baggage" beyond the stated definitions.
Well, I would accept that the dictionary definitions are completely inadequate to describe a word's usage.
My understanding is that coordinate bilinguals will not even
try to find matches, they will simply use the correct word
according to the context. Compound bilinguals, on the other
hand, will tend to carry the same baggage in each language,
and have a much tighter match in semantic mappings.
Stephen Krashen (
http://www.sdkrashen.com) makes a distinction between 'learning' and 'acquisition' (I don't remember whether he originated this idea). Learning is studying rules and vocabulary; acquisition is getting an intuitive feel through immersion. It sounds to me that the result of learning is what you call here compound bilinguals, and the result of acquisition is coordinate bilinguals.
The thesis to which I referred found that there was no real
measurable shift in personality for compound bilinguals, but
a clear shift for coordinate bilinguals, which I think is
what I would have predicted if the SWH is true.
Since it seems to me that coodinate bilinguals gain their ability through immersion, which also almost always includes cultural immersion, that comes as no surprise, and doesn't require SWH to explain it.