Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 229

The above discussion on how languages differ in the way they map words onto concepts implicitly introduced the notion of “linguistic relativity,” that is, the idea that language influences thought or, more precisely, that differences between languages in the way they encode aspects of the surrounding world cause speakers of different languages to think differently about the world. The theory not only applies to nominal concepts such as color but also to grammatical concepts such as tense, number, and gender. For example, the fact that verb forms in English but not in Indonesian contain tense markers (information about the time of the event or action described by the verb: past, present, or future) is thought to result in different time cognition in speakers of English and Indonesian. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) is regarded as the major advocate of this view, which is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (after Whorf and his mentor Edward Sapir).

Bilingual studies on linguistic relativity are still sparse, though their number is growing because of the awareness that bilingualism has the potential to critically inform the linguistic relativity debate. It may do so because “bilinguals are the only ones to experience directly the effects of linguistic relativity” (Pavlenko, 2005, p. 437). Do bilinguals experience different conceptual worlds when they speak their one or other language (a form of bilingualism that in the older literature is known as “coordinate bilingualism”)? If so, is each of these identical to the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of the languages concerned? In the case of sequential bilingualism (where L2 acquisition starts after L1 acquisition), are there intermediate states prior to an end state of experiencing two conceptual worlds and, if so, what are they? Or is it perhaps the case that bilinguals have developed a blended conceptual world shared by the two languages and different from the conceptual world of monolingual speakers of either language (known as “compound bilingualism”)?

Research suggests that some structural contrasts between a bilingual's two languages become reflected in conceptual representations that differ from those of monolingual speakers of these languages (e.g., Bassetti, 2007, a study on the effects of grammatical gender differences between Italian and German on the mental representation of objects; Athanasopoulos & Kasai, 2008, a study that examined the effect of grammatical number differences between English and Japanese on object representation). At least one bilingual study, testing the grammatical tense contrast between English and Indonesian (Boroditsky, Ham, & Ramscar, 2002), suggests that bilinguals can switch between two language‐specific modes of thinking and that this mental reset can be triggered by just a modicum of language. Recent studies on the conceptual representation of color similarly point at the flexibility of bilingual cognition by showing that bilinguals' responses in a color discrimination task varies with the usage frequency of either language (e.g., Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Krajciova, & Sasaki, 2011).