Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847693369 ISBN 13: 9781847693365

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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 multilingual 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 of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. 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), editor of Bilingual Minds (Multilingual Matters, 2006) and co-editor of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004).

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Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages

By Aneta Pavlenko

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2011 Aneta Pavlenko and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-336-5

Contents

Contributors, vii, 
Acknowledgments, ix, 
1 Introduction: Bilingualism and Thought in the 20th Century Aneta Pavlenko, 1, 
2 Cognitive Restructuring in Bilingualism Panos Athanasopoulos, 29, 
3 Language-specific Patterns in Event Construal of Advanced Second Language Speakers Barbara Schmiedtová, Christiane von Stutterheim and Mary Carroll, 66, 
4 Language-specific Patterns in Event Conceptualization: Insights from Bilingualism Emanuel Bylund, 108, 
5 Thinking, Speaking and Gesturing about Motion in more than One Language Marianne Gullberg, 143, 
6 The Art and Science of Bilingual Object Naming Barbara C. Malt and Eef Ameel, 170, 
7 (Re-)naming the World: Word-to-Referent Mapping in Second Language Speakers Aneta Pavlenko, 198, 
8 Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages: Overview of the Field Aneta Pavlenko, 237, 
Author Index, 258, 
Subject Index, 264, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Bilingualism and Thought in the 20th Century

ANETA PAVLENKO

I still remember it as if it happened yesterday: the unseasonably chilly October morning, the immense line outside the warehouse, and our excitement and anticipation of the treasures we might discover inside. It was the fall of 1992 and my friends and I were first year graduate students in Linguistics at Cornell University, waiting for the opening of Ithaca's famous Friends of the Library book sale. It turned out that true aficionados had camped overnight outside the warehouse on Esty Street and so, for the first hour after the opening, we could only screen the people exiting triumphantly with their brown paper bags full of books, and hope that they were not carrying all the prizes away. Then, finally, we were at the door. Checking the book sale's map, we raced through the crowded floor to the linguistics bookcase and began raiding its holdings. And there it was: a caramel brown binding with golden letters announcing that this volume, published in 1949, contained Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Two decades later, I still remember the thrill of lifting the book off the shelf, of finding the ex libris of emeritus Psychology Professor Robert MacLeod (Cornell professors regularly donated books to the book sale), of reverently looking through its well-thumbed pages and of coming across this mysterious comment:

To pass from one language to another is psychologically parallel to passing from one geometrical system of reference to another. The environing world which is referred to is the same for either language; the world of points is the same in either frame of reference. But the formal method of approach to the expressed item of experience, as to the given point of space, is so different that the resulting feeling of orientation can be the same neither in the two languages nor in the two frames of reference. Entirely distinct, or at least measurably distinct, formal adjustments have to be made and these differences have their psychological correlates. (Sapir, 1949 [1924]: 153)

These words beautifully captured the disorientation of my own transition from Russian to English and I could not wait to see what Sapir meant by the psychological correlates. But when I scanned the following text, I realized, with great disappointment, that this was just a cryptic aside in a discussion of the relationship between grammar and the lexicon. I was left alone, like a particularly clumsy Alice, who saw a tantalizing glimpse of another world and then failed to cross through the looking glass. What did Sapir mean? Why didn't he examine the phenomenon of bilingualism any further? What is the relationship between bilinguals' languages and thought? These questions haunted me ever since, but the answers continued to be elusive because, until now, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular, of disengagement with bilingualism.

The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. In doing so, some of the chapters in this collection will engage with the theory of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The goal of this engagement, however, is to understand the implications of Sapir's and Whorf's ideas for speakers of multiple languages, not to 'prove' or 'contest' the hypothesis commonly formulated as follows:

the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. (Pinker, 1994: 57)

I have made the editorial decision to side-step the debates about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for three interrelated reasons. The first is my deep conviction that the articulation of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the research based on this articulation represent a departure from Sapir's and Whorf's original ideas. In Section 1.3 of this chapter, I will trace the transformation of Sapir's and Whorf's complex arguments into the sound-bite juxtaposition of 'strong' linguistic determinism to 'weak' linguistic relativity and reveal the real authors of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – North American psychologists Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg.

The second reason for side-stepping the debates involves a limited and limiting set of questions inspired by the Brown-Lenneberg hypothesis, questions that presuppose monolingualism as the norm. Only in the world imagined to be monolingual could one consider the possibility of languages 'determining' people's thoughts, without asking what happens with those who grow up speaking two or more languages, or those who learn other languages later in life. Consequently, instead of reviewing studies easily accessible to the readers, I will provide a historic overview of lesser-known research on bilingualism and thought.

The third reason involves constraints placed on research design by the current articulations of linguistic relativity. Instead of asking when, how, why and to what degree languages may influence cognitive categories and processes, current research privileges investigations of non-verbal behaviors that provide 'true' evidence 'for' or 'against' linguistic relativity. Lucy (1992a), Slobin (1996) and Levinson (2003) criticized this oversimplification and offered convincing arguments in favor of combining laboratory and naturalistic, as well as verbal and non-verbal, tasks in the study of linguistic relativity. Their arguments, however, have not been fully heeded by researchers in psychology, where 'habitual thought' is examined through experiments that measure reaction times to artificial tasks in laboratory conditions (e.g. Boroditsky, 2001; Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008).

To sum up, then, the present volume as a whole does not aim to take a position on or to provide any evidence 'for' or 'against' the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its current formulation (but see Chapter 2). Rather, it contributes to the scholarship on language and cognition by expanding its range to bilingual speakers as a focus of a systematic and sustained inquiry. This is particularly important because in today's globalized urban environments,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847693369
• ISBN 13: 9781847693365
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 278
• Herausgeber: Pavlenko Aneta
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland