Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals

Natalia Kucirkova
2011 Europe's Journal of Psychology  
Within the current global and multicultural context, a monolingual orientation is no longer tenable in a comprehensive study of psycholinguistics. However, since its foundation in the 1950s, the majority of psycholinguistic research has been carried out in a monolingual framework. It is only in the last 15 years that studies in bilingualism have shown that many psycho-neurobiological factors shaping the acquisition and use of language may be altered and affected by bi-and multilingualism. In
more » ... newly published book, Annette M.B.de Groot challenges the view of monolingual psycholinguistics. Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, De Groot provides a comprehensive discussion of the psychology of language from both the bilingual and multilingual perspective. Despite the book's title Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals, the book is unable to give equal weighting for material on both phenomena. This is due to the unbalanced volume of studies on bilingual and multilingual psycholinguistics, with the former significantly outweighing the latter. De Groot attempts to redress this imbalance by suggesting that multilingualism can be in many respects seen as 'noisier' bilingualism (De Groot, p.2). Therefore, many of the theories and processes described are seen as applicable to both bilingualism and multilingualism and the two terms are used interchangeably throughout the book, as well as in this short review.
doi:10.5964/ejop.v7i2.137 fatcat:odsywsaz6nhyxdfwdrbqthty4i