Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation

Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.

The goal of this volume is to highlight an affective dimension of the bi-/multilingual experience and to place emotion on a par with cognition in investigations of bilingual minds. Opening up a new field, the contributors ask several novel and provocative questions. To answer these and related questions, the contributors employ both quantitative and qualitative approaches and draw on advances in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, psychology, neurolinguistics, and literary criticism. This book will be of great interest not only to scholars in the fields of bilingualism and second language acquisition, but also to all who live their lives through the means of more than one language.

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, US. 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) and a co-editor of three volumes, Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender (Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004), and Gender and English Language Learners (TESOL, 2004).