Using Network Science to Map What Montréal Bilinguals Talk About Across Languages and Communicative Contexts

The authors point out that recent work within the language sciences, particularly bilingualism, has sought new methods to evaluate and characterize how people differentially use language across different communicative contexts. These differences have thus far been linked to changes in cognitive control strategy, reading behavior, and brain organization. The authors approach this issue using a novel application of Network Science (a mathematical technique for revealing connections and patterns) to map twenty-one conversational topics (e.g. sports, politics, religion) that Montreal bilinguals discuss across communicative contexts (e.g., work, home, family, school, social settings), in their dominant vs. nondominant language. Surveying 115 French-English bilinguals, 66 of whom identified French as their stronger, or ‘dominant’, language, while the other 49 identified English as their dominant language, their results demonstrate that all communicative contexts display a unique pattern in which conversational topics are discussed, but only a few communicative contexts (work and social) display a unique pattern of how many languages are used to discuss particular topics. The authors also demonstrate that the dominant language has greater network size, strength, and density than the non-dominant language, suggesting that more topics are used in a wider variety of contexts in this language. Lastly, using community detection to thematically group the topics in each language, the authors found evidence of greater specificity in the non-dominant language than the dominant language. They contend that Network Science is a valuable tool for representing complex information, such as individual differences in bilingual language use, in a rich and granular manner, that may be used to better understand brain and behavior.

Journal of Neurolinguistics

Vol. 56

17 pages

November 2020

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