Social network analysis investigates the relationships that individuals have with the other people in their lives. The present study adds to the emerging area of research that investigates bilingualism through the lens of personal social networks [1,2]. We designed an experiment to investigate the relationships between bilingual language use and social use of the two languages in different social settings, and over lifespan with the goal to understand if language(s) use shapes individuals’ social networks. We tested Spanish/English bilinguals who acquired both languages before the age of seven. During the social network interview, participants provided the names and details about the linguistic interactions with people across the family, school, and professional domains during two different life ranges: 0-13 and 14-present. Additionally, participants completed a short battery of cognitive tasks (i.e., Stroop, Flanker) to assess their cognitive control. We hypothesized that larger network size and greater variety in language usage would be correlated with greater cognitive control capabilities. Preliminary data (N=40) suggest a trend in which bilinguals use both of their languages early in life and English more towards their second stage. The cognitive control tasks have yet to be analyzed.
References
[1] Gullifer, Jason W., and Debra Titone. "Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23, no. 2 (2020): 283-294.
2] Tiv, M., Gullifer, J. W., Feng, R. Y., & Titone, D. (2020). Using network science to map what Montréal bilinguals talk about across languages and communicative contexts. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 56, 100913.