Exploring nuance in both experience and adaptation: Commentary on Titone and Tiv (2022)

Abstract

The keynote article by Titone & Tiv (2022) represents a key step forward in characterizing and quantifying bilingual experience, and how this may be leveraged to examine neurocognitive outcomes. The framework takes a novel multi-leveled approach to capturing and describing language experience. The first level handles the direct language use dynamics of a given individual or ego-driven language dynamics. Beyond the individual or ego is the level of interpersonal language dynamics, that is the dynamic situations of interaction one is faced with. These interactions are guided (at least in part) by ecological/societal language dynamics- overarching trends and conditions at the community and societal level which set parameters on the nature of language dynamics and interaction in the ego’s environment. Finally, although not directly discussed within the paper, temporal dynamics- that is dynamic shifts and trends of language experience across time- of language use sit at the outermost level. Bilingual experience is truly a multidimensional spectrum with a number of experiences that condition its outcomes and the framework proposed by the authors provides a basis for better capturing the levels of social context which condition an individual’s opportunities for engagement. However, neurocognitive adaptations to these experiences are also a multidimensional spectrum and these too need to be better linked to the dynamicity of bilingual language experience.