Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi-and multingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who speak more than one language? And if they do not, how can we explain the difficulties second language learners experience in mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.

"Whenever I lecture about `thinking for speaking' someone in the audience will ask about language and thought in the bilingual mind. Aneta Pavlenko's masterful volume provides the fullest set of answers I know of to that important question. The expert chapters provide a voyage of discovery through bilingual minds as encountered in lab experiments and personal experience - in words and gestures and eye movements and memories. The authors skilfully summarize their own research and theorizing, returning to common themes. The editor beautifully presents those themes in opening and closing chapters. Anyone who has pondered the big questions of language and cognition canot help but be fascinated by this ongoing voyage of discovery."---Dan I. Slobin, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Despite growing evidence that different languages influence thought, only a few pioneering researchers have begun to grapple systematically with the conceptual implications of speaking two or more languages. This collection brings together leading researchers in this exciting new area to take stock of what has been discovered thus far and the research challenges that lie ahead. The volume thus represents a landmark in the study of the nature of the multilingual mind." John A. Lucy, University of Chicago, USA

"This book makes an important contribution to the exploding field of bilingual cognition research. It comes from a new generation of researchers uninhibited by recent prejudices against the very concept of linguistic relativity." Viv Cook, University of Newcastle, UK

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is a Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, and recipient of the 2009 TESOL Distinguished Research Award and 2006 BAAL Best Book Award. She is an author of Emotions and multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-author of Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition (with Scott Jarvis, Routledge, 2008) and editor of several volumes, including The Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Multilingual Matters, 2009) and Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation (Multilingual Matters, 2006). She also published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition and has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan.