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Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages
Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages
Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages
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Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages

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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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 19, 2011
ISBN9781847694935
Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages

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    Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages - Aneta Pavlenko

    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 Schmiedtová, 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 rompió, 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)

    Eventually, this new language becomes not only the language of the outside, but also the language of the inner speech and communication with the self:

    When I talk to myself now, I talk in English.... If I tried talking to myself in my native tongue, it would be a stumbling conversation indeed, interlaced with English expressions. So at those moments when I am alone, walking, or letting my thoughts meander before falling asleep, the internal dialogue proceeds in English. (Hoffman, 1989: 272)

    For immigrants, this achievement may come at the price of a loss – the loss of the native language as a meaningful vehicle of thought, emotion and communication (Pavlenko, 1998). This loss, so acutely felt by Hoffman (1989), is also mourned by Lerner, who recalls her inability to communicate in German, the family language, with her sister Nora:

    I no longer thought in German and therefore could not express anything significant in that language. I lacked the facility, I said. I would often start a letter to Nora in German and give it up after a few lines, switching to English. (Lerner, 1997: 44)

    For Kyoko Mori, who was born and grew up in Japan but now resides in the USA, this inability to translate oneself into her native Japanese became the dominant source of anxiety during her visits to Japan:

    Trying to speak Japanese in Japan, I’m still thinking in English. I can’t turn off what I really want to say and concentrate on what is appropriate. Flustered, I try to work out a quick translation, but my feelings are untranslatable and my voice is the voice of a foreigner. The whole experience reminds me of studying French in college and being unable to say or write what I thought. (Mori, 1997: 17)

    It is not surprising that the transition from one ‘language of thought’ to another is acutely perceived and dramatically described by the global nomads – immigrants, travelers, expatriates – who change languages as teenagers or adults and witness all the stages of this transition. Yet, the relationship between languages and thought is also pondered on by childhood bilinguals who, like Julian Green, bilingual in French and English, wonder: ‘Does one think in the same way in both languages and in terms, which are, so to speak, interchangeable?’ (1993 [1941]: 83). His own experience provides a negative answer to the question. In particular, Green recalls a time when he started writing an autobiography in French, only to shift to English because he found an English-language publisher. Shortly afterward, he realized that he was

    writing another book, a book so different in tone from the French that a whole aspect of the subject must of necessity be altered. It was as if, writing in English, I had become another person. I went on. New trains of thought were started in my mind, new associations of ideas were formed. There was so little resemblance between what I wrote in English and what I had already written in French that it might almost be doubted that the same person was the author of these two pieces of work. (Green, 1993 [1941]: 62)

    His experience mirrors that of other bilingual writers and scholars who learned their second languages later in life and found themselves writing the same book or the same paper differently in different languages (Todorov, 1994; Ward Jouve, 1991). It also reflects the experience of writers, like the Spanish-English bilingual, Rosario Ferré, or the French-Spanish bilingual, Claude Esteban, who grew up with two languages and perceive themselves as different people and different writers in these languages:

    Writing in English is like looking at the world through a different pair of binoculars: It imposesadifferentmind-set. (Ferréin Kellman,2003:138)

    Non, je n’étais pas le même, dès lors que je m’exprimais en français et en espagnol, et il me fallait vivre avec ce dédoublement de la conscience, des mots, des gestes de chaque jour, sans parvenir jamais à les réduire.

    [No, I was not the same when I expressed myself in French and Spanish, and I have had to live with this doubling of consciousness, words, everyday gestures, without being able to reduce them.] (here and further on author’s translation; Esteban, 2004)

    What are we to make of these disquisitions about ways in which languages shape – and re-shape – thought? Long ago, a prominent North American psychologist, Roger Brown, advocated mistrust in such testimony from bilinguals because ‘there is a familiar inclination on the part of those who possess unusual and arduously obtained experience to exaggerate its remoteness from anything the rest of us know’ (Brown, 1958: 233). Following his argument, we could dismiss these statements as individual affectations or exaggerations – if not for the systematicity with which the theme of different languages linked to different ways of thinking reappears across time and space.

    One could also argue that the views of people without academic training on such a complicated subject as thought are simply uninformed and unsophisticated. And yet, this argument does not hold because self-reports linking languages with different ways of thinking come also from linguists (e.g. Wierzbicka, 1985, 1997) and from bilingual writers, who spend even more time than linguists thinking about ways in which different sets of words and structures capture, transform and distort the reality that they are trying to convey. Miller (1996: 275) argues that as writers, they ‘have needed to develop knowledge about language and, as a rule, an ear for its meanings that is more acute and subtler than that possessed by the rest of us’.

    Alternatively, we could try to dismiss their views as a writerly trope – if not for the fact that this trope emerges not only in the work of writers, but also in the testimonies of scholars and laypeople from a variety of linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. For instance, several respondents to the questionnaire that Jean-Marc Dewaele and I have administered on-line to 1039 bi- and multilinguals, replied along the same lines:

    Yes when I am in the country where the language is spoken. I think differently. (Monica, 33, Italian-French-English-Spanish-Amharic) (Pavlenko, 2006: 13)

    Different languages allow me different thought structures and possibly different ways of feeling too. (Erica, 38, German-English) (Pavlenko, 2006: 24)

    Thus, I side with Haiman, who sees great intrinsic value in bilinguals’ self-reports:

    From a scientific point of view, using native testimonials is perhaps like making an elephant a professor of zoology, but it may be that on this kind of subject elephants who do not pretend to transcend their species are more reliable authorities than human professors of zoology who delude themselves that they are able to transcend theirs. To put this another way, the inner self is a subject that can be approached only from within. (Haiman, 2005: 114–115)

    These reports ‘from within’ tell us that for many, albeit not all, bi- and multilinguals, a change in the language of interaction results in changes in self-expression and ultimately in ways of seeing and perceiving (Pavlenko, 2006). From this perspective, in the view of Pérez-Firmat:

    the ultimate validity of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is irrelevant. What is crucial is that many bilinguals relate to their languages in ways that enact some version of this hypothesis. (Pérez-Firmat, 2003: 13)

    What this means, in other words, is that for many bi- and multilingual speakers, both the idea of linguistic determinism and the opposition to linguistic relativity are absurd because their own linguistic experience illuminates ways in which languages shape and affect thought and, simultaneously, provides an escape from these influences through the learning and use of additional languages. Consequently, as already mentioned earlier, this volume will side-step the linguistic relativity debate and explore instead the linguistic and cognitive processes that lead so many speakers to live out linguistic relativity as their everyday reality. To ensure the success of this research venture, it is critical to understand why two previous attempts to engage in the study of bi- and multilingualism and thought – Epstein (1915) and Ervin(-Tripp) (1954, 1964, 1967) – did not generate any follow-ups. In what follows, I will consider these studies in their historical and sociopolitical contexts.

    1.2 Bilingualism and Thought in the 20th Century: 1900s–1940s

    The idea that languages are linked to the culture and possibly even thought of their speakers is by no means new – it achieved prominence in the 18th century in the work conducted within the Western Classical and German Romantic traditions by Leibniz, Herder and, most notably, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) (Allan, 2007; Joseph, 2002; Koerner, 2002). It was Humboldt who permanently linked languages with world views [Weltanschauung], arguing that ‘the differences between languages are not those of sounds and signs but those of differing world views’ (1836, translated in Humboldt, 1963: 246).

    Humboldt’s views, shared by other 19th and early 20th-century scholars, such as Steinthal, Whitney and Boas, inspired the first systematic scholarly investigation of the relationship between multi-lingualism and thought – Izhac Epstein’s (1862–1943) doctoral dissertation, La pensée et la polyglossie (Epstein, 1915), carried out at the University of Lausanne. The key research questions posited in the study involved the relationship between multilingualism and thought, with the latter operationalized as different types of mental operations, including inner speech, mental translation and calculations. The data collected by the researcher included: (a) a study of school students’ perception and memory for foreign language words; (b) responses to a questionnaire distributed to 23 multilingual participants in and outside Switzerland; and (c) the author’s introspections and observations of other multilingual children and adults. The questions asked in the questionnaire touched on perceptions of translation (non-)equivalence in the respondents’ languages, crosslinguistic influence, verbal imagery invoked by particular languages, language choice, language of mental calculations and the language of the participants’ dreams. Epstein (1915: 11) also directly asked: ‘Pensez-vous quelquefois en langue étrangère et à quelle occasion?’ [Do you ever think in a foreign language and when (on what occasion)?]. His underlying assumption was that ‘chaque peuple a une façon particulière et caractéristique de grouper, afin de les nommer, les choses et leurs propriétés, les actes et les rapports’ [every nation has a particular and characteristic manner of grouping things and their properties, actions and relations, in order to name them] (Epstein, 1915: 115) and that these differences may affect multilinguals’ thought processes.

    Using his data, largely consisting of self-reports, Epstein (1915) concluded that multilinguals associate languages with particular people, contexts and domains, and spontaneously adjust inner speech, or the language of the mental dialog, depending on the topic, and imagined settings and interlocutors. Mental calculations, he found, are conducted in the L1 or in the language in which mathematical instruction took place. Regarding learning modes, he argued that if foreign languages are learned in communicative settings, ‘les diverses langues peuvent, chez le polyglotte, s’associer chacune directement à la pensée et fonctionner, sous toutes les formes impressives et expressives, indépendamment de Lm’ [different languages may, in a multilingual, attach themselves directly to thought and function, in all modes of perception and expression, independently of the mother tongue] (Epstein, 1915: 35). In contrast, languages learned through the grammar-translation method will be attached to translation equivalents and require mental translation. The type of linkage will depend on the instruction method, the level of proficiency (direct linkage requiring a higher level of proficiency), the mode of expression (direct linkage being more common in speaking) and individual differences. Furthermore, even when multilinguals ‘think’ in the L2, they may borrow terms from the L1 that are non-existent in the L2.

    While Epstein’s (1915) views of what constitutes ‘thought’ and linguistic influences on thought were not particularly sophisticated, some of his ideas about bilingualism appear strikingly contemporary. His views of the relationship between the L1, the L2 and the conceptual store are reminiscent of later distinctions between coordinate and subordinate bilingualism, his ideas about ‘une influence négative ou inhibitrice’ of the previous language of conversation in the case of an abrupt language change predate by almost a century our notions of language activation and inhibition, while his reflections about ‘l’interférence’ and ‘l’inter-calation’ invoke our own ideas about language transfer, code-switching and lexical borrowing. To assist the formation of direct links between ‘thoughts’ and L2 words, Epstein (1915) advocated the Direct Method that had eliminated translation exercises and the mother tongue of the pupils from the classroom, and this recommendation, once again, is echoed in later support for immersion approaches.

    The parallels with contemporary thinking on the interaction between languages render the conclusion reached by Epstein (1915) at the end of his monumental thesis a complete surprise to the present-day reader. Arguing that bilingualism slows down the thought process through activation of alternative options available in other languages, Epstein (1915: 210) concluded that ‘La polyglossie est une plaie sociale’ [Multilingualism is a social ill]. Consequently, his recommendation was to limit foreign language instruction to reading and basic everyday expressions, the only two skills an educated person really needed. And since bilingualism could be particularly harmful for young children whose thought processes were still developing, his recommendation was to begin foreign language instruction in later childhood, at an age experimentally determined. Regarding instruction per se, he recommended an oral beginning followed by a greater engagement with literary modes.

    Surprising to us, the conclusion reached by Epstein (1915) was in line with the Western European trend of the era to see bilingualism – at least that of the lower classes and ethnic minorities – as an intellectual impediment and a site of a cognitive, linguistic and emotional conflict. A negative view of bilingualism was particularly prominent in multilingual countries and areas torn by language conflicts, such as Belgium, Catalonia, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Wales, where arguments about the negative cognitive consequences of bilingualism were martialled in defense of particular nationalist positions and educational curricula (for discussion, see Weinreich, 1953: 71–73, 115–122). In Belgium, for instance, monolingual Flemish and Walloon children were shown to outperform French-Flemish bilinguals (Toussaint, 1935). Similarly, in Wales several studies documented the superior test performance of monolingual children over Welsh-English bilinguals, providing support for English-only instruction (Saer, 1924; Saer et al., 1924; Smith, 1923). Among the key arguments in these studies were the monolinguals’ superior ‘accuracy of thought’ (Smith, 1923: 282) and delays caused by the recall of alternate word symbols in the two languages (Saer, 1924: 38). Concerns about bilingualism were also expressed by Jespersen, one of the best-known European linguists of the era:

    It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages: but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. It may seem, on the surface, as if he talked just like a native, but he does not really command the fine points of the language. Has

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