Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:54:51.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bi- and multilingualism as a metaphor for research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2008

ANETA PAVLENKO
ANETA PAVLENKO*
Affiliation:
CITE Department, College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I would like to begin by thanking the editors of the journal, and in particular Carmen Silva-Corvalán, for inviting such a wonderful group of commentators, united in their commitment to spirited yet courteous academic debate and diverse in their academic allegiances, theories, and methodologies. I also thank the commentators for the kindness and generosity of their comments, which offered rich material for reflection. Reading the comments for the first time, I became concerned that a coherent response that addresses the Emotion Stroop Effect in the same breath as the textual explorations of the “third space” may be all but impossible. I thought about the resemblance between the academic enterprise and the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism, with academic paradigms establishing their own regimes of truth and creating languages that are often mutually incomprehensible. For some, true answers can only come from quantifiable empirical data, others look for veracity in texts and personal testimonies. Some take for granted that “monolingual controls” are a necessary component of solid research on bilingualism, while others doubt the meaningfulness of such a comparison, reminding us that languages are artificial constructions (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and questioning the very existence of crosslinguistic influence (Hall, Cheng and Carlson, 2006). And so we proceed with our parallel lines of research inspired by similar questions about the human condition and yet carried out in ways so distinct as to be incompatible.

Type
Authors responses
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 197 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anooshian, L. & Hertel, P. (1994). Emotionality in free recall: Language specificity in bilingual memory. Cognition and Emotion, 8 (6), 503–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barsalou, L. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 513–562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brierley, B., Medford, N., Shaw, P. & David, A. (2007). Emotional memory for words: Separating content and context. Cognition and Emotion, 21 (3), 495–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cervantes, C. (2002). Explanatory emotion talk in Mexican immigrant and Mexican American families. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Science, 24 (2), 138–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Groot, A. M. B. (1993). Word-type effects in bilingual processing tasks: Support for a mixed-representational system. In Schreuder, R. & Weltens, B. (eds.), The bilingual lexicon, pp. 27–51. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dong, Y., Gui, S. & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Shared and separate meanings in the bilingual mental lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 8 (3), 221–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, A. (1999). Emotion talk among Mexican-American and Anglo-American mothers and children from two social classes. Merrill–Palmer Quarterly, 45 (2), 267–284.Google Scholar
Galasiński, D. (2004). Men and the language of emotions. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, J. K., Cheng, A. & Carlson, M. (2006). Reconceptualizing multicompetence as a theory of language knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 27 (2), 220–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ijaz, I. H. (1986). Linguistic and cognitive determinants of lexical acquisition in a second language. Language Learning, 36, 401–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, K. & Melzi, G. (2004). Intimacy, imitation, and language learning: Spanish diminutives in mother–child conversation. First Language, 24 (2), 241–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koven, M. (2006). Feeling in two languages: A comparative analysis of a bilingual's affective displays in French and Portuguese. In Pavlenko, A. (ed.), Bilingual minds: Emotional expression, experience, and representation, pp. 84–117. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuebli, J., Butler, S. & Fivush, R. (1995). Mother–child talk about past emotions: Relations of maternal language and child gender over time. Cognition and Emotion, 9 (2/3), 265–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kyratzis, A. (2001). Constituting the emotions: A longitudinal study of emotion talk in a preschool friendship group of boys. In Baron, B. & Kotthoff, H. (eds.), Gender in interaction, pp. 51–74. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Makoni, S. & Pennycook, A. (eds.) (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Malt, B., Sloman, S. & Gennari, S. (2003). Universality and language specificity in object naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 20–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehl, M. & Pennebaker, J. W. (2003). The sounds of social life: A psychometric analysis of students' daily social environments and natural conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84 (4), 857–870.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mehl, M., Pennebaker, J. W., Crow, D. M., Dabbs, J. & Price, J. (2001). The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): A device for sampling naturalistic daily activities and conversations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 33, 517–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehl, M., Vazire, S., Ramírez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science, 317, 82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murphy, G. (2002). The big book of concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (in press). Conceptual representation in the bilingual lexicon and in L2 vocabulary learning. In Pavlenko, A. (ed.), The bilingual mental lexicon: Theories and methods. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual couples talk: The discursive construction of hybridity. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M. (2004). “Cultural” concepts and the language–culture nexus. Current Anthropology, 45 (5), 621–645.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stearns, P. (1989). Jealousy: The evolution of an emotion in American history. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Stearns, P. (1994). American cool: Constructing a twentieth-century emotional style. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Stearns, P. & Lewis, J. (eds.) (1998). An emotional history of the United States. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar