Cross-cultural Cognition and Bilingualism (2)

2. Method

2.1 Participants

20 participants, 7 bilinguals and 13 multilinguals were took part into the test. Their age range is from 20 years old to 43 years old. The mean age is 24.2 years old, and median of age is 25 years old. Participants’ ethnic differs from Asian to White, including European and American white, to Afro-Caribbean. There are 10 Asian, including Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Pakistan, and Arabic, which account for 50% percent of participants; 9 Whites, including Polish, Italian, Russian, Belgium, Ecuadorian and British, which account for 45% of the participants; and 1 Afro-Caribbean, which account for 5% of the participants. There are 9 female and 11 male who took the test, which indicate that the test is slightly dominant by male, while the proportion of male and female is relatively balanced. The educational level of them varies from high school diploma (1 person), bachelor (8 persons), master (9 persons, including people who are doing MA degrees and those whose last degree are MA) and PhD (2 persons). 17 of participants’ occupations are students, including bachelor student, postgraduate student and PhD student. 1 participant whose last degree is high school diploma is working in bank industry. 1 participant whose last degree is master is a researcher. 1 participant whose last degree is PhD is a lecture. It means that the majority of the participants are current students in universities.

The test was conducted in English combined with a Chinese translation for a Korean participant who cannot speak English, which lead to the result that the shared language is English for participants grossly. The numbers of participants’ languages varies from two to five languages. 7 participants are bilinguals, and 13 multilinguals, including 5 trilinguals, 5 quadrilinguals and 3 pentalinguals. Involved languages include Polish, Chinese, Urdu, Tatar, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French, Thai, German and Danish. 16 participants suggested that their first languages are learnt naturalistically, while 4 people suggested that their first languages are leant both naturalistically and instructedly. Consider that in Education system language as a curriculum is compulsory for pupils, we view all learning context of participants’ first languages are naturalistically. 7 participants reported they leant their second language in instructed context, 13 participants both in instructed and naturalistically, and only 1 participant in naturalistic context. It indicates that the mean way of learning a second language for participants’ are in instructed context. 4 out of 13 multilinguals leant their third language naturalistically. The way to learn a forth or fifth language varies from instructedly, naturalistically to both. The self-report of languages that participant No. 16 could speak is very interesting. He is a Japanese male researcher who is 43 years old and speaks Japanese as his first language. He reported that his second language is Chinese, which he learnt when he was 19 years old in both instructed and naturalistically context, while his third language is English, which is learnt when he was 12 in instructed context. Second language is the language an individual leant after his first language. This participant explain that his partner’s dominant language is Chinese, which becomes to be one of his dominant language other than Japanese. He considered the relative strength of a language rather than the leant order of a language. The more dominant a language is, the earlier it should be ranked, which is a very intriguing idea. 70% participants are bilinguals who leant their second language before 12 years old.

For all participants, L1 is the language to communicate with friends and family. The frequency of using a language is categorized into 6 levels (Never=0, every year=1, every month=2, every week=3, every day=4, several hours a day=5). The average frequency of participants using L1 is 4.5, between the level of everyday and several hours a day, which indicate that L1 is the dominant language for all participants. They use L1 as the language to communicate with friends and family. The average frequencies of using L2, L3, L4 and L5 are 3.85, 3,2.67 and 4 respectively. L2 is mainly used to communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers. L3 is used to be the language among friends and acquaintances and both L4 and L5 are used among friends. The average frequency of using L5 is unusually high, which is a combining result of infrequent speakers of L5 (only 2 participants) and the learning contexts for speaker is instructed with a language partner.

2.2 Materials

The project was conducted by questionnaire. The questionnaire is a variety of the Bilingual and Emotions Questionnaire by Dewaele and Pavlenko (2001). The questionnaire was a web-questionnaire (www.bbk.ac.uk/sllc) that was online from 2001 to 2003, which collected nearly 1600 effective samples of multilinguals.

The questionnaire was anonymous. The original questionnaire was composed by three parts. We kept the consistence of the first part of the questionnaire between our variety and the original one. This part include 13 questions relating to participants’ gender, age, education level, ethnic group, occupation, languages known, dominant language(s), chronological order of language acquisition, context of learning, age of acquisition, frequency of use, typical interlocutors, and self-rated proficiency scores for speaking, comprehending, reading and writing in the languages in question (Wilson and Dewaele, 2010).

The second part of the questionnaire was edited based on the original questionnaire. It consisted of 9 closed-ended Likert-type questions on language choice for the expression of various emotions with various interlocutors, on code-switching behavior in inner and articulated speech, on language choice for mental calculation, on language choice for expressing feelings of anger, on the use and perception of swear-word in different languages, and on communicative and foreign language anxiety in the different languages (Wilson and Dewaele, 2010).

The last part of the questionnaire contained 3 open questions. The first one asked about the strength of endearment expression, specifically ‘I love you’ in participants’ different languages. The second asked about the preferable language choice of discussing bad/emotional memories. The third one asked about cognitive identities of speakers when speak different languages. A final open question invited the participant to comment on the questionnaire itself.

2.3 Equipment and Procedure

The project was delivered from 11th April 2013 to 20th April 2013. All questionnaires were delivered to and collected from our participants online by email, QQ (a Chinese online-chatting software), facebook message. Participants were requested to fill in the questionnaire using different font of color to distinguish answers from questions. A Chinese translation was produced for participant No. 16 whose English is not good enough to finish the English questionnaire.

The data collection lasted about one week. The questionnaire was delivered to participants soon after been designed. Due to the project conducting time was just after Eastern Holiday, some participants were still on vacation. In addition that the questionnaire need about 15 minutes minimum to finish, participants’ reflecting time was relatively long. But enough data (22 sample) was still collected on time according to agenda. Excluding two questionnaires that were not totally accomplished, 20 valid row data were completed by 18th April. On one hand, most of the participants are friends or acquaintance of researchers, which decreased the degree of collecting difficulty; on the other hand, this lead to a problem that samples have similar occupational backgrounds as students (75%).

This is also one limitation of our project that the samples are limited to certain social status and social backgrounds. Every participant had been informed the purpose and procedure of the project and was agree to take part in.

Then the collected data was analyzed and interpreted using software such as Microsoft Office Excel and SPSS.