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

Area of Science:

• Language Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Network Science

Background:

• Bilingualism research seeks methods to understand language use across contexts.
• Previous studies linked language use differences to cognitive control, reading, and brain organization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To apply Network Science to map bilinguals' conversational topics across contexts and languages.
• To investigate how communicative context and language dominance influence topic discussion patterns.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Network Science to analyze conversational topics of bilinguals in Montréal.
• Examined topic patterns across various communicative contexts (work, home, social, etc.).
• Compared topic networks between dominant and non-dominant languages using community detection.

Main Results:

• Each communicative context showed unique topic discussion patterns.
• Work and social contexts uniquely displayed patterns in the number of languages used per topic.
• Dominant languages exhibited larger network size, strength, and density compared to non-dominant languages.
• Non-dominant languages demonstrated greater topic specificity than dominant languages.

Conclusions:

• Network Science provides a valuable framework for analyzing complex bilingual language use.
• Findings highlight context-specific and language-dominant differences in topic representation.
• This approach offers a granular understanding of individual differences in bilingualism, aiding brain and behavior research.