The Bilingual Mind: And What it Tells Us about Language and Thought

by Aneta Pavlenko

If languages influence the way we think, do bilinguals think differently in their respective languages? And if languages do not affect thought, why do bilinguals often perceive such influence? For many years these questions remained unanswered because the research on language and thought had focused solely on the monolingual mind. Bilinguals were either excluded from this research as 'unusual' or 'messy' subjects, or treated as representative speakers of their first languages. Only recently did bi- and multilinguals become research participants in their own right. Pavlenko considers the socio-political circumstances that led to the monolingual status quo and shows how the invisibility of bilingual participants compromised the validity and reliability of findings in the study of language and cognition. She then shifts attention to the bilingual turn in the field and examines its contributions to the understanding of the human mind.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Language

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 22, 2014

Reviews

[Jarda Kubalik · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is more like a never-ending literature review with an average of 20 cited papaers per page, which makes it less readeable. It feels it was mostly written for the author herself rather than for a wider audience. If you want to read it as a contribution to the Sapir Whorf hypothesis debate, you may still not get a clear and satisfactory answer, a fact that the author explains in her book. It keeps the detailed, strict, inconclusive, hard to generalize style of a single article with the size of a monograph, well, it is a long list research papers in one area of linguistics which, when left without a strong claim deduced from it, is not very useful. Say a parent of bilingual children wants to read it... well, they might be disappointed.
But as an academic report, it is extremely diligently compiled and researched.

[Mike Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! A must read for those interested in linguistic relativism. Very insightful and well written.