New JESLA article: Sasaki & Murahata (2024)

Recent categorisation studies have shown that languages segment parts of the body differently and that even if two languages have equivalent body part terms, they cover slightly different portions of the body. Although there are an increasing number of such studies across languages, only a few small studies on categorisation of body parts in bilinguals have been conducted so far and the results are not straightforward (e.g., Kasai, et al. 2012). The current study improves on the body colouring tasks used in previous studies, in order to compare the equivalent body parts examined between Japanese and English and tested those bilinguals with a wider range of English proficiency. The qualitative analysis observes individual variation of colouring patterns including some unexpected patterns in bilinguals, suggesting conceptual integration. Statistical analyses show that the bilinguals categorise the areas such as arm, foot, leg, head, face, back and lower back in Japanese differently from the English L1 users but the differences do not always correspond to their English proficiency, which indicates dynamic language knowledge in the minds of bilinguals. As the multi-competence model claims, these results show Japanese users of L2 English slightly change their categorisation of body parts from L1 in the process of L2 acquisition.