Biscriptality: a neglected construct in the study of bilingualism

The standard participant in cognitive research on the bilingual mental lexicon is literate in English and some other European language written in the same (Latin) script, i.e., in a shared alphabetic orthography. Why should this matter? It matters because research conducted with monoscriptal users of European languages has been taken to have broader applicability. This is problematic because most bilinguals who are literate in two languages are likely to be biscriptal—not monoscriptal—and their languages are likely to be written in orthographies that are not alphabetic. In this essay I reflect on the theoretical and ethical implications of this disconnect between the typical bilingual research participant and the typical bilingual. I argue that an implicit construction of monoscriptal bilingualism as the standard form of bilingualism and the centering of characteristics of alphabetic writing systems in bilingual word recognition research has led to a serious gap in our understanding of the bilingual mental lexicon, as we know very little about the majority of the world’s bilingual language users, whose writing systems are very different from the (alphabetic) standard promoted in existing research. If our understanding of bilingual lexical representation is to move beyond its monoscriptal focus the field will have to become more reflexive about its epistemic exclusionary practices and create space for crosslinguistic research that centers biscriptal language users of other-than-alphabetic writing systems and studies them in their own right, not just for how they might corroborate claims based on a less representative population.