Historical antecedents

A social view of language and multilingualism is not new in human history. Ambrose Bierce started drafting definitions for the “Devil's DictionaryFootnote ¹” in 1881, and was pre-dated by legions of satirists, philosophers, semioticians, rhetoricians, and many others. Nor is it new within the language sciences (e.g., the sub-fields of linguistic anthropology, language evolution, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language planning, education, and more; for engaging reviews, see Edwards, Reference Edwards2012a, Reference Edwards2012b; García & Wei, Reference García and Wei2014; Grosjean, Reference Grosjean1982; Steffensen & Fill, Reference Steffensen and Fill2014). However, a countervailing force from both linguistic and psycholinguistic traditions collectively biases us to abstract away from (or ignore altogether) the admittedly noisy and hard-to-measure sociocultural reality of the linguistic code, and how humans wield this code in the service of everyday sociocultural needs. This bias likely arose from historical factors operative during the emergence of psycholinguistics that emphasized methodological rigour with a high degree of quantitative precision and may have been driven by a touch of behaviorism-envy (recounted in Gardner, Reference Gardner1987; Harris, Reference Harris1995). It is baked into operational definitions of language that prioritize its symbolic and referential properties, and how humans encode and decode these properties (e.g., the so-called “message model”, reviewed in Bavelas & Chovil, Reference Bavelas and Chovil2000).

A socially infused view of language and multilingualism has long been essential within certain subdomains of linguistics (e.g., linguistic anthropology, the study of endangered languages and linguistic revitalization, sociolinguistics; e.g., Bybee, Reference Bybee2010; Cacoullos & Travis, Reference Cacoullos and Travis2018; Labov, Reference Labov2011), and has been necessary for applied work on first and second language learning in both children and adults, as forecasted almost three decades ago (Bates & Carnevale, Reference Bates and Carnevale1993), likely due to the need of these disciplines to enhance people's actual learning and use of a first or second language in everyday life. Thus, leading theories of individual language learning characterize the uniqueness of human language as a joint product of an exquisitely tuned, and neurocognitively-driven statistical learning capacity (i.e., the emergentist, usage-based view), alongside an exquisitely tuned and neurocognitively-driven social motivation to “mentalize” (e.g., a theory of mind capacity; Astington & Baird, Reference Astington and Baird2005; Beatty-Martínez & Dussias, Reference Beatty-Martínez and Dussias2018; Bybee, Reference Bybee2010; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, Reference Ellis and Larsen-Freeman2009; Hernandez, Claussenius-Kalman, Ronderos, Castilla-Earls, Sun, Weiss & Young, Reference Hernandez, Claussenius-Kalman, Ronderos, Castilla-Earls, Sun, Weiss and Young2019; Ibbotson, Reference Ibbotson2013; López-Beltrán & Carlson, Reference López-Beltrán and Carlson2020; Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2000; Wulff, Reference Wulff2008). Importantly, the impact of emergentist, usage-based theories is now felt in studies of adult language processing (novel language learning studies reviewed in Palma & Titone, Reference Palma and Titone2021), where a starting assumption is that novel language learning progresses over the lifespan (Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain & Tarone, Reference Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain and Tarone2016), in a manner that can be modulated by social aspects of the learning context (e.g., Raviv, Meyer & Lev-Ari, Reference Raviv, Meyer and Lev-Ari2020). Similarly, comprehensive but perhaps lesser-known frameworks (described below) explicitly conceive of people as nested within a hierarchy of social contexts that mutually constrain each other (e.g., Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain and Tarone2016; Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner1977, Reference Bronfenbrenner1979; de Bot, Lowie & Verspoor, Reference de Bot, Lowie and Verspoor2007). Collectively, these approaches inspire new ways of defining language, such as the following formulation we find appealing.

“…the term language refers to:

1. (i) the means by which one individual more or less reliably orients another's thoughts and actions;

2. (ii) a culturally determined set of acoustic, gestural, and/or written signals;

3. (iii) the trans-generational stability of these signals, and

4. (iv) the functioning of these signals in an environment with artifacts and practices that support the ways the individuals living in that environment are oriented by the language(s) they speak.” (Andresen & Carter, Reference Andresen and Carter2016, p. 9)

It is instructive to examine different historical antecedents of socially infused conceptions of language. One pertains to long-standing discussions in linguistics about how to best classify and compare languages around the globe (reviewed in Edwards, Reference Edwards2012a, Reference Edwards2012b). The very idea of what constitutes a language is inherently fuzzy, even assuming a highly constrained view of language as a mere symbolic system (e.g., “a culturally determined set of acoustic, gestural, and/or written signals”). Thus, the task of identifying a clear boundary where one language starts and another begins, often with intervening dialects that have shifting and asymmetric patterns of mutually intelligibility (Andresen & Carter, Reference Andresen and Carter2016), is notoriously difficult precisely because such determinations are inherently culture-bound (e.g., “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”, attributed to a Bronx high school teacher who attended a 1945 lecture by Yiddish linguist; Weinreich, Reference Weinreich1945).

The situation becomes increasingly complex when one considers the limitless variety of historical forces leading to multilingualism in communities around the globe, and the ensuing dynamic way that language symbols evolve over time (e.g., “flatten the curve” has taken on semantic nuance it never had before COVID-19). This minimally involves geographically disparate groups of people (communicating using culturally distinct acoustic, gestural, and/or written signals, Andresen & Carter, Reference Andresen and Carter2016) coming in contact to accomplish mutual (e.g., commerce) or one-sided (e.g., colonization) social goals (Wei, Reference Wei2011). While many forces cause people to form groups, Edwards (Reference Edwards2012a, p. 37) notes “the most insistent and the most salient contexts are those involving societies of unequal power and dominance”. Indeed, all of us currently live this reality in one form or another, either as members of a privileged linguistic majority (usually English-speaking but not always), as members of Indigenous, immigrant, and racialized linguistic minorities, or as some combination of all of the above. It is no coincidence that one of the most commonly used tools of societal-level human control is regulating the languages that people (particularly children) use both inside and outside the home (particularly in schools), across time and place, even within fictional worlds (e.g., “Newspeak”; Orwell, Reference Orwell1984).

Thus, crucial to any classification of world languages, and consequently the experiences of people who speak and comprehend them, are sociocultural forces acting upon individual people when they choose or are compelled, utterance by utterance, to speak one or another language in daily life. Edwards (Reference Edwards2012a) outlines no fewer than ten categories of language contact positioned around three distinct axes of variability: first, whether Indigenous, immigrant, or racialized linguistic minorities are only found within a particular region; second, how tightly organized they are within that region, and third, how physically separate they are from the linguistic majority (see also de Bot, Reference de Bot2019; Raviv et al., Reference Raviv, Meyer and Lev-Ari2020; Wei, Reference Wei2011). Accordingly, while the sociolinguistic forces leading to multilingualism in Canada (officially English–French) may bear some similarity to those operative in another officially English–French nation (e.g., Cameroon), there also exist crucial differences that can predict how people produce and comprehend multiple languages in these regions (see Grosjean & Li, Reference Grosjean and Li2013; Grosjean, Reference Grosjean1982 for prescient attention to such details). This may include how motivated people are to activate or suppress one or another language within different social settings, particularly with respect to regulating the L1 (Bjork & Kroll, Reference Bjork and Kroll2015; Bogulski, Bice & Kroll, Reference Bogulski, Bice and Kroll2019; Kroll, Dussias, Bice & Perrotti, Reference Kroll, Dussias, Bice and Perrotti2015; Pulido, Reference Pulido2021; Zirnstein, van Hell & Kroll, Reference Zirnstein, van Hell and Kroll2018; Zirnstein, Bice & Kroll, Reference Zirnstein, Bice and Kroll2019) alongside a host of additional sociopolitical factors.

In sum, around the globe, issues surrounding language and multilingual use are at the heart of justifiable concerns about ethnolinguistic vitality and language endangerment in communities where majority, minority, and Indigenous languages collide (e.g., Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, Reference Giles, Taylor and Bourhis1973; Heller, Reference Heller1978; Sioufi & Bourhis, Reference Sioufi and Bourhis2017). They have a palpable, everyday psychological reality that exerts its collective effects one person, family, and salad or pasta shop at a time (see Doucerain, Reference Doucerain2019, for a recent study of language-driven acculturative stress in Montréal). On occasion, they trigger social revolutions both “quiet” and loud (Kircher, Reference Kircher2009; Leimgruber, Reference Leimgruber2020).

Socially-infused ecological approaches

While a careful reader may be persuaded that social and cultural factors are crucial for multilingual processing at an individual, neurocognitive level, they may also be uncertain about how to account for so many mutually constraining layers of language use in real time. On this point, another key historical antecedent of a socially infused view of language derives from a tradition collectively referred to as linguistic ecology, language ecology, or ecolinguistics (reviewed in Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain and Tarone2016; de Bot et al., Reference de Bot, Lowie and Verspoor2007; Edwards, Reference Edwards2012a, Reference Edwards2012b; Steffensen & Fill, Reference Steffensen and Fill2014; Wei, Reference Wei2011).

Haugen (Reference Haugen, Paulston and Tucker1972) was among the first to refer to the “ecology of language”, highlighting the ways in which language use for individual people aligned with the ecology of language use within the larger social context. Echoes of this approach are evident in now classic works within multilingualism (e.g., Grosjean, Reference Grosjean1982, in which Haugen is featured prominently and acknowledged as a mentor). They are also evident in a recent characterization of bilingual behavioral variability (Green, Reference Green2011), that underlies core assumptions of the influential Adaptive Control Hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi, Reference Green and Abutalebi2013)

As described by both Edwards (Reference Edwards2012a) and Steffensen and Fill (Reference Steffensen and Fill2014), a strength of Haugen's approach was its focus on attributes of the broader ecological niches occupied by languages and the people who speak them (i.e., “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment”, Haugen, Reference Haugen, Paulston and Tucker1972, p. 225). Thus, while the focus was not on history per se, it was on the linguistic and psychological consequences of historical forces, including matters of language status (i.e., the social power assigned to speakers of particular languages), and intimacy (i.e., the solidarity, friendship, and bonding with other people afforded to speakers of particular languages). The psychological aspect of Haugen's approach is evident in the following quote highlighted by Steffensen and Fill (Reference Steffensen and Fill2014).

“Part of [a language's] ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to others.” (Haugen, Reference Haugen, Fill and Mühlhäsler2001, pg. 57).

Moreover, as Edwards (Reference Edwards2012a) observed, this approach is similar in spirit to that of other theorists at the time, including Wallace Lambert from our own department at McGill (e.g., Peal & Lambert, Reference Peal and Lambert1962) whose focus on language attitudes and status led to one of the first empirical demonstrations of positive bilingualism impacts on general cognitive abilities, and perhaps one of the first papers to seriously consider the social context of bilingualism. Rather than piling onto the then scholarly assertion that bilingualism was a social liability, Peal and Lambert showed that bilingual children in Québec (where bilingualism was socially valued when the research was conducted) performed better than monolingual children on a battery of verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, language proficiency and language attitude tests (that controlled for the methodological confounds of prior work such as socioeconomic status, quality of schooling, etc.) Peal and Lambert were thus among the first to promote the idea that bilingual experience is an opportunity rather than a liability in terms of mental flexibility (for an overview of Lambert's research contributions, see Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2014). This emphasis on social nuance was later championed by others who worked and/or trained with Lambert at McGill (e.g., Cárdenas et al., Reference Cárdenas, de la Sablonnière and Taylor2017; Genesee & Lindholm-Leary, Reference Genesee and Lindholm-Leary2020; Huang & Nicoladis, Reference Huang and Nicoladis2020; Vaid & Meuter, Reference Vaid, Meuter, Libben, Goral and Libben2017), and of course was the seed for modern conjectures about the positive cognitive consequences on bilingualism across the lifespan (reviewed in Bialystok, Reference Bialystok2021).

Nevertheless, the ecolinguistic approaches described thus far were somewhat vague in specifying what constitutes a language ecology or environment, and particularly how to systematically and precisely quantify such differences (a point to which we return below). Steffensen and Fill (Reference Steffensen and Fill2014) partially address this issue by identifying several ways the environment of a language had been conceived of within ecolinguistic traditions, for which numbers 1, 3, and 4 (bolded below) are likely most relevant to psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience approaches to multilingualism:

1. “[1] Language exists in a symbolic ecology: this approach investigates the co-existence of languages or ‘symbol systems’ within a given area.

2. [2] Language exists in a natural ecology: this approach investigates how language relates to the biological and ecosystemic surroundings (topography, climate, fauna, flora, etc.).

3. [3] Language exists in a sociocultural ecology: this approach investigates how language relates to the social and cultural forces that shape the conditions of speakers and speech communities.

4. [4] Language exists in a cognitive ecology: this approach investigates how language is enabled by the dynamics between biological organisms and their environment, focusing on those cognitive capacities that give rise to organisms’ flexible, adaptive behaviour.” (Steffensen & Fill, Reference Steffensen and Fill2014, p. 7)

Thus, in the same way that the vision scientist Marr (Reference Marr1982) famously articulated three interdependent levels of analysis for complex cognitive systems (i.e., computational, algorithmic, implementational), an ecolinguistic approach makes it possible to specify several simultaneously operative, interdependent levels for considering how languages (and thus language users) interact with (and are impacted by) their symbolic, sociocultural, and cognitive ecologies. Accordingly, language ecology researchers such as Haugen, his contemporaries, and his intellectual beneficiaries (e.g., Grosjean, Reference Grosjean1982; and the history-enamored authors of this Keynote), have made it possible to consider developing unified models of language that might help guide a socially infused approach to thinking about individual multilingual processing.

Perhaps most noteworthy for our purposes is work by the developmental psychologist, Bronfrenbrenner, who wrote extensively about the ecology of human behavior in the context of development (reviewed in Shelton, Reference Shelton2018). Bronfenbrenner (Reference Bronfenbrenner1977, p. 513) lamented on behalf of developmental psychology that: “To corrupt a contemporary metaphor, we risk being caught between a rock and a soft place. The rock is rigor, and the soft place relevance.” To remedy this situation, he developed a comprehensive socioecological framework to reject the “implied dichotomy between rigour and relevance” (Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner1977, p. 514; Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner1979). This framework was comprised of systematically nested spheres of social influence, in which individual children were embedded. These spheres were argued to reflect the reciprocal, iterative interactions between individual and their local environmental settings (e.g., school, work, family), referred to as the microsystem; the totality of their distinct settings or microsystems, referred to as the mesosystem; the indirect, external social forces impacting their micro- and mesosystems (e.g., neighborhood dynamics, mass media, etc), referred to as the exosystem; and finally, the overarching cultural/historical/societal context from which all their lower level systems are derived (i.e., their blueprints), referred to as the macrosystem. From this, Bronfenbrenner pursued different nuanced notions of ecological validity – for example, asking researchers to question the degree to which the actual social contexts of their experiments lawfully interacted with psychological phenomena of interest. To Bronfenbrenner, the “main effects” of any psychological experiment should actually be “interactions” of how different phenomena vary within individuals, or across matched individuals, as a function of social context.

Bronfenbrenner's work subsequently inspired many other research domains, including language. Highly relevant in this regard is The Douglas Fir Group (Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain and Tarone2016), a pseudonymed group of transdisciplinary language researchers, who developed a linguistically specified ecological framework targeted to second language acquisition. Similar to Bronfrenbrenner, The Douglas Fir Group argued that to truly understand second language acquisition in a manner that would be sufficient to advance effective methods of learning and instruction, it would be necessary to think beyond capacities of individual learners to the many other ways in which learning environments also contributed to successful individual learning outcomes. Thus, they too developed a framework consisting of highly nested levels, where the individual and their neurocognitive capacities were at the center, followed by local interactions with other people across different languages (i.e., the microlevel of social activity), then higher level that bridged individual interactions as in the case of neighborhoods, families, places of work (i.e., the mesolevel of sociocultural institutions and communities), and then the highest social level of cultural and political values (i.e., the macrolevel of ideological structures).

Similar in spirit, but derived instead from complexity and dynamical systems theory, was de Bot et al. (Reference de Bot, Lowie and Verspoor2007) who, in their Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Keynote, asserted that second language acquisition consisted of a series of nested dynamical systems, where each system varies in granularity, but all operate according to the same dynamic principles. Within this view, language is less a fax-machine-like message transmitter, and more a dance between people communicating with each other, where each interactional dance partner creates perturbations that lead to emergent properties that exceed the sum of each individual's solo contribution. Filipović and Hawkins (Reference Filipović and Hawkins2019) also posits an integrative dynamical systems view, according to which second language performance is jointly determined by internal factors, such as AoA and proficiency (among others) and external factors.

To conclude this section, several socioecological approaches have been discussed over the years, culminating in frameworks that systematically detail the social spheres that are relevant to individual language use. This leads us to the next section that details how our group has capitalized upon these traditions to develop a Systems Framework of Bilingualism, with which we bridge psycholinguistic or neurocognitive individual functions via socioecological forces.

A Systems Framework of Bilingualism

We present here a comprehensive socially-situated Systems Framework of Bilingualism to guide our understanding of the complex sources of sociolinguistic context that influence people's language use, development, and cognition (Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan & Titone, Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021; Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain & Titone, Reference Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain and Titonein press). This framework blends language-relevant elements of Bronfenbrenner's social-ecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner1979), other ecolinguistic traditions (Finke, Reference Finke2001; Grosjean, Reference Grosjean1982; Labov, Reference Labov1972; Steffensen & Fill, Reference Steffensen and Fill2014; Van Lier, Reference Van Lier2002), and theoretical efforts in language acquisition (Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Byrnes, Doran, Duff, Ellis, Hall, Johnson, Lantolf, Larsen–Freeman, Negueruela, Norton, Ortega, Schumann, Swain and Tarone2016; de Bot et al., Reference de Bot, Lowie and Verspoor2007; Leon Guerrero & Luk, Reference Leon Guerrero, Luk, Sánchez, Bauer and Wang2021). One goal of this approach was to underscore the broad implications of social context to all aspects of psycholinguistic behavior, cognition, and neuroplasticity, thus transcending domain-specific frameworks, such as second language acquisition. We also wished to explicitly consider the ways that interpersonal, ecological, societal, as well as historical or developmental constraints can jointly impact individual bilingual behavior.

Similar to past approaches, an individual person (referred to as an ego in the network science literature) within a Systems Framework of Bilingualism (depicted in Figure 1) exists in a nested hierarchical system of interdependent spheres of social influence. Interpersonal language dynamics is the first sphere of influence, which involves person-to-person interactions (akin to Bronfenbrenner's microsystem, or the Douglas Fir Group's microlevel). Ecological language dynamics is that second sphere of influence, which involves relatively local social contexts in which people communicate with other people (e.g., their residential neighborhood, their school or workplace, and any other ambient exposure to language such as what may be found within the linguistic landscape; akin to Bronfenbrenner's mesosystem, or The Douglas Fir Group's mesolevel). Societal language dynamics is the third sphere of influence, which involves higher-order characteristics of the society (akin to Bronfenbrenner's exosystem and macrosystem, or The Douglas Fir Group's macrolevel). This could include language attitudes, beliefs, status, and policy. Finally, at the outer limits, depicted by phases of the moon, is how the temporal dynamics of the system changes over developmental time, or in a manner shaped by historical context.

Fig. 1. A Systems Framework of Bilingualism (Figure taken from Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain and Titonein press), in which interdependent layers of sociolinguistic context iteratively and reciprocally impact the individual or ego. These layers include interpersonal, ecological and societal spheres of influence. Finally, developmental or historical time can exert subtle temporal influences on the system, in a manner that constrains cognition, behavior, and neuroplasticity.

Thus, within this framework, a given person sits at the base of a complex system that, crucially, uniquely varies given the particular configuration of languages that they know, and how they use those languages in daily life. For example, at the level of Interpersonal Dynamics, we can track how a bilingual person may use one language with their parents or guardians and another language with their siblings. Additionally, we can track whether the ego critically bridges different language groups (Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021; Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan & Titone, Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titonein press). In past work (Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021, Reference Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain and Titonein press), described below, we quantified these dynamics with social network attributes from the language(s) used in person-to-person interactions. As another example at the level of Ecological Dynamics, a bilingual person may live in a linguistically homogenous neighborhood, where one primary language is overheard in public spaces, such as groceries stores, restaurants, parks, and more, which in turn constrains their opportunities to engage with their other known languages. As a final example at the level of Societal Dynamics, while the Canadian federal government recognizes both English and French as official languages, the only official language in the province of Québec is French, where the majority of French speakers in Canada reside (~94% in 2017, Statistics Canada, 2016). Yet, Montréal is a linguistically diverse city where bilingualism may be viewed more favorably than, say, more rural regions in Québec.

A Systems Framework of Bilingualism has the exciting potential to create new socially infused questions about language and multilingualism to guide psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience research. However, there are a variety of practical challenges, which include but are not limited to measuring sociolinguistic experiences of an interpersonal nature (i.e., interpersonal language dynamics), and measuring sociolinguistic experiences at an ecological or societal level (i.e., ecological and societal language dynamics). We must also account for people's individual attributes (ego-driven language dynamics) that further constrain their neurocognition. In what follows, we briefly describe each set of challenges, starting with ego-driven individual differences, along with potential emerging quantitative solutions where applicable.

Moving forward

We hope to have convinced readers that people are embedded in a dynamic, multilevel system of sociolinguistic context whereby direct personal interactions and ambient language exposure constrain their everyday language behavior. Perhaps more importantly, we also hope to have offered theoretical and methodological paths for posing and answering questions about such phenomena, organized through the Systems Framework for Bilingualism. While quantifying such abstract and complex characteristics is undeniably challenging, we identified some of the clever ways that researchers of bilingualism have begun to measure and incorporate these dynamics into their empirical efforts. Interpersonal language dynamics can be grounded in compositional and structural aspects of the social network, which researchers have assessed using language entropy and (social) network analysis. Higher-order societal dynamics, within a single ecology or across distinct regions, may be assessed through census demographic analysis, self-reported questionnaires, and direct regional comparisons. We acknowledge that this is by no means an exhaustive list, and we are eager to see what tools will be developed in the future to capture additional sociolinguistic variations. Moreover, we have largely omitted empirical discussion of the most distal layer of the Systems Framework for Bilingualism, which has to do with systematic temporal constraints that are operative either developmentally over the lifespan, or historically, as discussed extensively in the introduction. Still, we are interested in how other researchers have approached this domain.

Skeptical readers may ask whether these ambient, contextual effects of bilinguals’ lived social realities really have consequential and observable impact on behaviors themselves. Our work (and the work of our colleagues) suggests that the answer could be yes. In one instance, Vlasceanu, Enz, and Coman (Reference Vlasceanu, Enz and Coman2018) advocated that individuals’ cognitive capacities, such as encoding and recalling memories, have emergent properties at the community level (i.e., “cognition in social context”). Accordingly, as individuals interact with others in their social networks, their individual memories synchronize to shape societal collective memory formation and vice versa. Other work has shown that ambient exposure to linguistically diverse contexts aids in perspective-taking behavior (Fan, Liberman, Keysar & Kinzler, Reference Fan, Liberman, Keysar and Kinzler2015) and language learning (Bice & Kroll, Reference Bice and Kroll2019). As previously mentioned, Gullifer et al. (Reference Gullifer, Chai, Whitford, Pivneva, Baum, Klein and Titone2018), Gullifer and Titone (Reference Gullifer and Titone2021b), and Gullifer et al. (Reference Gullifer, Pivneva, Whitford, Sheikh and Titoneunder review) showed that language entropy can impact both neural activity and cognitive performance across a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Other work by our group shows that characteristics of English and French speaking social networks can also predict lexical word knowledge, as measured by the LexTALE task (Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain and Titonein press).

Other newly emerging research from our group provides further evidence that multi-layered social context constrains multilingual behavior. We examined how structural characteristics of bilinguals’ social network associated with individual differences in mentalizing, a social cognitive process of representing and reasoning about others’ minds (Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titonein press; Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021). Specifically, we considered egos’ position in their social network and whether the presence or lack of third-party ties afforded them unique opportunities to engage in mentalizing to broker information between otherwise disconnected people (e.g., López, Reference López2020). We found that more centrally positioned egos, who bridged distinct language communities in the network, exhibited better performance on a mentalizing task. Of interest, this pattern was only detected among egos embedded in a linguistically diverse environment (Montréal, Canada) but not in a linguistically homogenous environment (Gainesville, United States). We interpreted this pattern of results from a cognitive flexibility viewpoint, such that social experiences that increase exposure to diverse perspectives (e.g., bilingualism, brokering information in the network) over time challenge group-based inferences (i.e., stereotypes) and engage more effortful cognitive processing on the internal thoughts and beliefs of others. Together, these results speak to how individuals’ social cognitive representations are jointly shaped by their daily social experiences within their network, as well as ambient demands of their broader sociolinguistic society (see also Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021; Reference Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Feng, Doucerain and Titonein press; Feng, Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Palma, O'Regan, Vingron, Doucerain & Titone, Reference Feng, Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Palma, O'Regan, Vingron, Doucerain and Titone2021; Reference Feng, Tiv, Kutlu, Gullifer, Palma, O'Regan, Vingron, Doucerain and Titoneunder review).

In terms of other practical steps researchers can take, as previously mentioned, one of the major impediments is how to quantify complex social behavior in such a way that it can be parsimoniously used to test predictions about individual cognition. To this end, we encourage language scientists to continue to leverage advances in statistical modelling. For example, in recent years, approaches such as mixed-effects regression modelling or multi-level modelling (MLM) have revolutionized the ways in which psycholinguists can pose and answer questions about complex language phenomena. This is because, at its core, MLM accounts for any sort of grouping or clustering of data points, which otherwise would violate the independence of observations criterion of traditional regression. Experimental language researchers were historically most familiar with clustering at the participant level (i.e., multiple observations from the same individual) and item level (i.e., repeated measures designs), separately. In these situations, using MLM to cluster by subject and item accounts for group-level variance and allows generalizations beyond the given sample and item-set. Of note, there are numerous other ways that bilingualism researchers can leverage the power of MLM that are not the norm. For example, language researchers tend to focus on fixed effects within MLM models, and to consider random effects in such models as experimental error terms (i.e., thus the long-standing debates in the field about maximal random effects structures (e.g., Barr, Levy, Scheepers & Tily, Reference Barr, Levy, Scheepers and Tily2013). However, as seen in papers outside psycholinguistics (e.g., Otto, Skatova, Madlon-Kay & Daw, Reference Otto, Skatova, Madlon-Kay and Daw2015), it is possible for us to harness the power of random effects within MLM to test hypotheses involving the interactions of multiple factors (see also Gries, Reference Gries2021; Meteyard & Davies, Reference Meteyard and Davies2020; Singmann & Kellen, Reference Singmann, Kellen, Spieler and Schumacher2019; Staub, Reference Staub2021; van Rij, Vaci, Wurm & Feldman, Reference van Rij, Vaci, Wurm and Feldman2020). Such endeavors could be highly useful when considering ways of rigorously testing a Systems Framework of Bilingualism.

In addition, group-level variance can be quantified using other statistical approaches that are not typical in our field, such as the model's Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC), and this same logic can be applied for other groupings to quantify contextual effects of, for example, respondents living in different regions (Otto et al., Reference Otto, Skatova, Madlon-Kay and Daw2015). Of course, newer more sophisticated approaches are always on the horizon (e.g., Generalized Additive Models, GAMs, Miwa & Baayen, Reference Miwa and Baayen2021, or Generalized Structural Equation Component Analysis, GESCA, Hwang & Takane, Reference Hwang and Takane2004), thus it behooves us to remain open to any and all statistical innovations that enable us to pose and answer increasingly sophisticated questions about language. As well, it behooves us to let our questions take center stage in helping to drive the creation of new statistical innovations. For example, explicit causal modelling, a statistical approach that is common within social psychology, but rarely used within the language sciences, has been used to great effect to test questions about the impact of bilingual experience on domain-general cognitive control (e.g., Kałamała, Szewczyk, Chuderski, Senderecka & Wodniecka, Reference Kałamała, Szewczyk, Chuderski, Senderecka and Wodniecka2020). To this end, we believe that borrowing a page from the social psychology playbook would be highly constructive to better understand the socioecological determinants of bilingualism. However, on this point, we issue an important word of caution to our readers. Specifically, our ability to successfully test examine the impacts of complex ecological and sociological experiences on individual behavior requires that we are fastidiously attentive to crucial issues regarding the internal and external validity of our measures, which gate the degree to which we can safely compare within and across populations (Flake et al., Reference Flake, Shaw and Luong2021).

Taken together, a holistic, socially situated and contextualized approach to bilingual neurocognition fills the gaps of traditional assessments of individual differences (in which the source of variation is considered to be internally motivated) and lends deeper insight into the rich complexities of real-world cognition. Nevertheless, there are experimental and statistical challenges in reaching this goal, and to this end, we have attempted to identify cross-cutting statistical tools to aid in the journey. In addition, we have reviewed the role that these complex dynamics play in microlevel and macrolevel bilingual cognition and behavior, and we are eager to see how other researchers take up the challenge of socially contextualizing their study of bilingual neurocognition.

Final words

Multilingualism is a living, breathing, and ever-evolving phenomenon. Despite the obvious role played by socioecological forces in shaping human experience of multilingualism (and by proxy, the neurocognitive machinery of language), theoretical and empirical efforts to characterize psycholinguistic processes in adults routinely ignore a social view of language, notwithstanding frequent allusions to “contextual factors” that are often vaguely or narrowly specified within any given study (including those conducted by our own group). This self-perpetuating omission sends an implicit but clear message that social factors are irrelevant to how mind and brain represents and processes language, yet our lived experiences and common sense tell us that nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather, within adult psycholinguistics, popular controversiesFootnote ⁴ rehash, in different guises, the old saw of whether human language capacities are functionally isolated from, or interactive with, “domain-general cognition” within human brains. Consider the staling bilingual advantages controversy that at its core newly realizes modularity controversies of decades gone by (reviewed in de Bot, Reference de Bot, Pfenninger and Navracsics2017; de Bruin, Dick & Carreiras, Reference de Bruin, Dick and Carreiras2021; Sekerina, Spradlin & Valian, Reference Sekerina, Spradlin and Valian2019; Titone & Baum, Reference Titone and Baum2014; Vīnerte & Sabourin, Reference Vīnerte and Sabourin2019). Consequently, in the same way that grammars around the world bias human attention towards particular real-world phenomena to the exclusion of others (e.g., Lewis & Lupyan, Reference Lewis and Lupyan2020) our discipline's perseverative focus on how “language loops in and around itself” (Andresen & Carter, Reference Andresen and Carter2016, page 31) biases our attention away from how language links us socially and cognitively to each other, and to the larger society and cultures around us. This may lead us to miss crucial discoveries about how bilingual or multilingual experiences enrich, or are enriched by a variety of in-the-wild social and cultural experiences. Thus, the import of so-called failures to replicate cognitive phenomena of interest (e.g., the “bitter fight over the benefits of bilingualism”, Yong, Reference Yong2016) might be that language use really is socially-rooted, as certain cognitive strategies (e.g., proactive control) may be effective in responding to certain social-environmental demands, but certainly not all (e.g., Bak, Reference Bak2016; Gullifer & Titone, Reference Gullifer and Titone2021b; Tiv et al., Reference Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan and Titone2021; Tran, Arredondo & Yoshida, Reference Tran, Arredondo and Yoshida2019; van den Noort, Struys, Bosch, Jaswetz, Perriard, Yeo, Barisch, Vermeire, Lee & Lim, Reference van den Noort, Struys, Bosch, Jaswetz, Perriard, Yeo, Barisch, Vermeire, Lee and Lim2019).

In closing, we hope this Keynote, and the commentaries it elicits from colleagues within our discipline, engages a wide array of researchers who are united under the broad umbrella of multilingualism. These include researchers with neurocognitive expertise who wish to better incorporate sociolinguistic and sociocultural theories in their work, researchers within socio-linguistic or socio-cultural traditions who wish to better illuminate how their findings link to neurocognition, and applied scientists or policy makers who wish for an enriched evidence base to make data-driven decisions about social policy across a variety of real-world settings. To this end, we stand reverentially on the shoulders of historical figures in the cognitive and neural sciences like Marr (Reference Marr1982), who outlined a new way of framing our approaches to understanding complex cognition, and historical language science (s)heroes such as Grosjean, Bates, and many others within bilingualism who repeatedly nudged us to consider the social context of language and bilingualism (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Mak, Chahi and Bialystok2018; Beatty-Martínez et al., Reference Beatty-Martínez, Navarro-Torres, Dussias, Bajo, Guzzardo Tamargo and Kroll2019; Green, Reference Green2011; Green & Abutalebi, Reference Green and Abutalebi2013; Kroll, Dussias, Bice & Perrotti, Reference Kroll, Dussias, Bice and Perrotti2015; Kroll, Takahesu Tabori & Navarro-Torres, Reference Kroll, Takahesu Tabori and Navarro-Torresin press; López et al., Reference López, Luque and Piña-Watson2021; Luk & Esposito, Reference Luk and Esposito2020; Ortega, Reference Ortega2020; Pliatsikas, DeLuca & Voits, Reference Pliatsikas, DeLuca and Voits2020; Surrain & Luk, Reference Surrain and Luk2019, Reference Surrain and Lukunder review; Vaid & Meuter, Reference Vaid, Meuter, Libben, Goral and Libben2017). We hope that the Systems Framework of Bilingualism offered here, while preliminary and not perfect, can help us all think more concretely and pragmatically about how to pose and answer psycholinguistic questions about language that are inclusive to diverse sociocultural realities.