Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 77) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847693369 ISBN 13: 9781847693365

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Aneta Pavlenko is Research Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oslo. Her research examines the relationship between multilingualism, cognition, and emotions. She has testified in court as an expert in forensic linguistics, lectured widely in North America, Europe and Asia, and authored more than a hundred articles and ten books, the most recent of which is The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is former President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year award and the 2009 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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, it is more and more difficult to locate monolingual speakers of languages other than English (cf. Chapter 2). Unfortunately, some researchers studying language and cognition have not yet come to grips with this fact and continue to perpetuate the illusion of the monolingualism of their participants, while others simply do not know how to deal with the 'messiness' of bilingualism. Thus, the first aim of this volume is to introduce research designs that allow for rigorous examination of language and cognition in bilingual speakers.

Its second aim is to return to Sapir's and Whorf's original focus on everyday life and linguistic thought and to highlight a range of context-sensitive and ecologically valid methods of psycholinguistic inquiry. Consequently, the studies discussed here examine language and cognition, or thinking and speaking, in the bilingual mind across a range of verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The chapter by Athanasopoulos will focus on 'thinking' and thus more directly on the Whorfian ideas, the following two chapters, by Schmiedtova, v. Stutterheim and Carroll, and by Bylund, will involve 'thinking, seeing, and speaking'; the next chapter by Gullberg involves 'thinking, speaking and gesturing'; and the remaining two chapters by Malt and Ameel, and by Pavlenko, 'speaking' and more specifically, 'naming'.

These chapters depart from the usual scholarly genres – they are neither argumentative essays nor empirical studies proper. Rather, the contributors were invited to discuss the programmatic work that they and their research teams – have been conducting on thinking and speaking in two languages and whose primary results have already appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Given the fact that these publications came out in a variety of disciplinary fields, and sometimes in languages other than English, we decided that it would be worthwhile to synthesize and analyze – and in some cases reanalyze – the results of the studies, thus engaging in a scholarly dialog that goes beyond a single study at a time.

To provide a social context for these chapters, I will begin by examining what bilinguals themselves say about thinking and speaking in two languages. To provide a historical context, I will then continue with an overview of ways in which the relationship between bilingualism and thought had been conceived of in the 20th century.

1.1 Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages: An Insider's View

One of the ways in which ecological validity is commonly established is to see whether the subject of inquiry is of interest and importance to the population in question. In the case of thinking and speaking in two languages, the answer appears to be a resounding 'yes'. Even the most superficial perusal of immigrant memoirs and bilinguals' autobiographies uncovers a wealth of reflections on thinking and speaking in two languages, with 'thinking' understood broadly as inner speech and as ways of perceiving, conceptualizing and framing objects, actions, events and phenomena.

In my own corpus of autobiographic writing by bi- and multilingual speakers, which includes texts in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Russian) and spans more than a century, these references appear throughout, starting with the turn of the 20th century memoirs of European immigrants who document the process of their assimilation in the USA (Pavlenko, 2004). For instance, Mary Antin, a Jewish woman whose family escaped tsarist Russia, writes joyfully in her celebrated autobiography, The Promised Land, that as a student at Barnard College, she 'learned at least to think in English without an accent' (Antin, 1912: 360). For Antin, this does not mean simply reaching a level of proficiency sufficient to express her thoughts – she talks about gaining new concepts, such as privacy (Antin, 1912: 289), and new perspectives, such as women's rights and individual fulfillment (Antin, 1912: 277).

Given the common theme of linguistic assimilation in immigrant and expatriate memoirs, it is not surprising that they paint a very similar trajectory where the new arrival continues to 'think' in the first language (L1) for a while and, only with time, shifts to 'thinking' in the second language (L2). Foreign language knowledge, on the other hand, does not appear to influence the thought process. For instance, Veronica Zhengdao Ye, a Chinese expatriate in Australia, states:

I had a fairly good command of basic English, but it had never influenced my way of thinking and experiencing the world until I moved to Australia. (Zhengdao Ye, 2007: 69)

According to bilinguals' autobiographies in my corpus, it is only when speakers move to the country where the language is spoken that this language begins to exert influence on their thinking, and even then the influence is not immediately apparent. A German immigrant in the USA, Gerda Lerner, recalls that in her first years in the country, she experienced a dissociation between her thinking processes and the language of the environment:

For nearly two years, I managed on that level of crude communication [in English], while my thoughts and dreams went on unperturbed in German. (Lerner, 1997: 35)

A similar reminiscence comes from Jade Snow Wong, who grew up in the USA speaking Chinese:

At this time [second year of college] Jade Snow still thought in Chinese, although she was acquiring an English vocabulary. (Wong, 1945: 132)

Eventually, however, the native language appears to suffer from disuse, and some immigrants, like the Polish-English bilingual, Eva Hoffman, experience what contemporary psycholinguists may characterize as deactivation or inhibition of the L1 and perhaps even language attrition, and the speakers themselves experience as an acute loss of inner speech:

The worst losses come at night. As I lie down in a strange bed in a strange house ... I wait for that spontaneous flow of inner language which used to be my nighttime talk with myself ... Nothing comes. Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shriveled from sheer uselessness. Its words do not apply to my new experiences ... (Hoffman, 1989:107)

For Hoffman, inner speech is the key vehicle of thought and its loss is tantamount to losing an important means of interacting with one's environment, as important as the eyes are to visual and the ears to aural perception:

I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us. To lose an internal language is to subside into an inarticulate darkness in which we become alien to ourselves; to lose the ability to describe the world is to render that world a bit less vivid, a bit less lucid. And yet the richness of articulation gives the hues of subtlety and nuance to our perceptions and thought. (Hoffman, 1999: 48)

Hoffman is not alone in her experience of the in-between world where one language has vanished and the other has not yet stepped up to the plate. Elaine Mar and Helen Kim, who came to the USA as children of immigrant families, respectively, from China and Korea, recall a similar time in their teenage years, when being caught between languages meant not being able to render one's thoughts in either:

I felt trapped inside my body. Language seemed a purely physical limitation. Thoughts existed inside my head, but I wasn't able to make them into words. (Mar, 1999: 66)

At the age of twelve, I started writing poems and short stories in Korean, but I wasn't learning any more Korean, and my English wasn't good enough to describe the complex emotions I was beginning to experience. I remember sometime around age fourteen visualizing what I wanted to express and consciously leaving out the words because they were inadequate. (Kim, 2000: 122)

Similar to Kim, Zhengdao Ye experienced the in-between time as a competition between the two languages for control of the thought processes and also as a time of frustration when the precision of self-expression is getting lost in the native language and is not yet found in the newly learned one:

the struggle between English and Chinese is constant. When speaking English, I may think in English, but only partially; the next moment, it flicks back to Chinese. Sometimes I get confused and the two languages merge – one on top of the other. I can hear myself speaking in English, but the substance seems to be in Chinese. It is my thoughts wrapped in a loose mantle of another language. I am desperate in trying to find the perfect fit, the best expression. But often, after a careful search of an array of synonyms, I still fret about that word. It pains, distresses, and angers me not being able to fully express myself in another language. (Zhengdao Ye, 2004: 138)

In their attempts to appropriate the new language, some immigrants may appeal to writing, oftentimes private writing, in the form of poetry or diaries. Hoffman (1989) talks about opening her first diary and forcing herself to make a decision between Polish, which was quickly becoming 'a dead language' (Hoffman, 1989:120), and English, 'the language of the present, even if it's not the language of the self' (Hoffman, 1989:121). 'My journals, which are filled with Korean, Konglish, bad English, and English, chronicle the frustration of this language transition', recalls Kim (2000: 122). Lerner (2002: 170) remembers writing poetry in English in order to bridge 'the difference between the German in which I thought and the English in which I attempted to write'. It is only with the passage of time and through deep immersion that the new language becomes the dominant language of immigrants' thoughts:

It took several years before I began to think in English. It was exciting when it actually happened and it made a qualitative difference in the way I lived. I began to be able to express myself with the speed and precision characteristic of me and most of the time I could find the word I needed without resorting to a dictionary. (Lerner, 1997: 40)

This ability to fully express oneself cannot be captured by the dominant second language acquisition (SLA) constructs of fluency and proficiency, because it involves something that goes far beyond lexical richness or speedy lexical retrieval, namely, the skill of selecting the word, the expression, the perspective that fits the new circumstances best. In other words, the speakers have to adopt a new way of seeing and perceiving. Some, like the Spanish-English bilingual, Ariel Dorfman, may recall the exact day when they realized that they were thinking, unconsciously, in the new language:

A day comes back to me – I must have been sixteen – the first time I realized that Spanish was beginning to speak me, had infiltrated my habits. It was in carpentry class and I had given a final clumsy bang with a hammer to a monstrous misshapen contraption I had built and it broke, fell apart right there, so I turned to the carpentry teacher and "Se rompio", I said, shrugging my shoulders. His mouth had twisted in anger. "Se, se, se." he hissed. "Everything in this country is se, it broke, it just happened, why in the hell don't you say I broke it, I screwed up. Say it, say, Yo lo rompí, yo, yo, yo, take responsibility, boy." And all of a sudden I was a Spanish speaker, I was being berated for having used that form of the language to hide behind, I had automatically used that ubiquitous, impersonal se ... (Dorfman, 1998: 114–115)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847693369
• ISBN 13: 9781847693365
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Pavlenko Dr. Aneta