Javier, R.A. (2007) The bilingual mind: thinking, feeling and speaking in two languages. Springer
This book aims to fill a gap in our knowledge about the ways in which bilingualism affects society. It begins with a general introduction into bilingualism which puts the topic in a wider social context. This introductory chapter is followed by eight other chapters, which deal with the evidence for the existence of a bilingual mind, language switching, bilingual memory and the expression of emotion, communication through interpreters, the assessment of bilingual proficiency, the treatment of bilingual patients, and the future of bilingualism. To a certain extent it is true that there are never enough books about bilingualism. As negative views of bilinguals are still common in many parts of the world, and in particular in the US, books on bilingualism can help to overcome prejudice. This book provides some support for bilingual education and multiculturalism, in particular in the final chapter, and other researchers in the field will no doubt welcome the position taken by the author in this issue. Another contribution this book makes to the field of bilingualism is that it draws attention to some of the literature on the relationships between bilingualism and memory, including the author’s own work (Javier 1989; 1996) and to the specific problems involved in the psycho-analytic treatment of bilingual patients. This is welcome, as work from the field of clinical psychology is not often discussed in other textbooks on psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism. The main drawback of this monograph from my perspective is that the summaries of the research evidence offered in this book are far from comprehensive and not up-to-
date. In chapter 2 (Is there a bilingual mind?), for example, a model of the process of linguistic organization is offered which appears to be mainly based on Johnson (2000). No attempt is made to link this model to other more widely used models of speech processing (Levelt 1989), nativist or emergentist models of language development in children (Chomsky 1998; MacWhinney 1999; O’Grady 2005) or models of bilingual speech processing (Dijkstra and Van Heuven 1998; Green 1998). The model in this chapter therefore does little to further our understanding of the processes it aims to depict. In third chapter, entitled “the bilingual linguistic organization”, the author discusses some of his own work on “the language independence phenomenon”, a term not commonly used by researchers in bilingualism, but which appears to be used among psychotherapists for a bilingual’s ability to acquire and maintain two languages, and in particular two conceptual systems. It is the methods used to investigate this phenomenon (and the ill-defined notion “language primitivization”) that are particularly worrying. Javier and Alpert’s (1986) work involves studying aspects of language processing in bilinguals under stress conditions, where stress is created with the help of a buzzer which produces sounds of between 113 and 123 decibels through headphones to the ears of subjects1. One wonders how carrying out such experiments could comply with ethical standards in any research institution, as the strength of this buzzer sound corresponds to the sound of a car horn (110 decibels), a rock concert or a jet engine (120 decibels each). According to the information I have been able to find, noises above 120 decibels are in the range which cause noise-induced hearing loss (see:
1
The information regarding the decibel levels is not provided in the book, but can be found in Javier and Alpert (1986).
http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/faq.cfm). If studies such as these need to be mentioned at all, then one would expect the author to explain the methodology used is unethical by today’s standards and not representative for the methods used by psychologists in the 21st century. In chapter 4 (“Language switching as a communication”) the references to the literature are limited to work from the sixties and seventies, although most work on codeswitching started after this date. Another series of very worrying experiments on monolinguals involving the use of mild and strong electric shocks (Bridger 1970) is discussed in the section on the role of stress in code-switching. Bridger (1970) and Riess (1940), who worked with a buzzer to investigate language functioning under stress conditions, appear to have been the main sources for Javier’s own work in this area (Javier and Alpert 1986). The conclusion that code-switching is more likely under conditions of mild stress (p. 61), reached by the author on the basis of his own experiments, is hardly surprising, and does not appear to contribute to any current theory of code-switching. Chapter 5 deals with bilingual memory and the language of affect. The main merit of this chapter is that it refers to literature on the relationships between language and memory from the perspective of psycho-therapy. While the author’s own work (Javier 1989; 1996) in this field is certainly of interest to the research community, one would have expected to see far more references to the current literature. Significant recent contributions to the field of the expression of emotion in bilinguals (Pavlenko 2005; Pavlenko and Dewaele 2004) are missing from this chapter.
Chapter 6 focuses on communication through interpreters, and gives a detailed analysis of errors made by interpreters, in particular in clinical contexts.This chapter is somewhat unexpected in a volume on the bilingual mind, even though the author makes an important point about the dangers involved in making decisions in clinical treatments if there is no reliable interpretation service available. In chapter 7, the assessment of bilingual abilities is discussed. The chapter is interesting in that it mentions tests that are not commonly used in the field of bilingualism, such as the Woodcock-Johnson-R/III. Mention is also made of a Global Word Naming test in both languages of the individual, but no further details of this test are provided, except that it appears to be a test in which the subject is asked to “tell as many different words as possible within a minute’s time” (p. 114). As no constraints are imposed on the kinds of words the informant needs to say, it is unclear what information such a test can provide. Tests more commonly used in the field are semantic fluency tests (name as many animals, types of fruit or vegetables as you can think of in one minute) or letter fluency tests (name as many words that start with the letter “t” that you can think of in one minute) are not discussed in this chapter. Chapter 8 is probably the most interesting in the book because it focuses on the treatment of bilingual patients in a psycho-analytical context. The reconstruction of events in the memory of bilinguals is an area that has not received a lot of attention in mainstream research in the field and further investigations in this field can no doubt offer new perspectives on the bilingual mind. In conclusion, the main merit of this book is that it gives a summary of some work on the expression of emotion and recall of memories in bilinguals as carried out in
the field of psychotherapy. A general textbook about the bilingual mind should however be much more comprehensive in its review of the recent psycholinguistic literature and the methods that are being used in the field.
Jeanine Treffers-Daller Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science University of the West of England, Bristol Frenchay Campus Coldharbour Lane Bristol BS16 1QY Email:
[email protected]
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