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by Aneta Pavlenko (Editor)
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.
Author Biography
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).
