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  • Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation
  • William E. Dunn
Pavlenko, Aneta (Ed.). (2006). Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 324 , CAD$54.95.

Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation, edited by Aneta Pavlenko, begins with the question, 'What does it mean to open up a new area of research?' This question reflects very well the book's ambitious aim of initiating and stimulating a line of inquiry that explores the topic of emotions in second language acquisition and use. While Bilingual Minds acknowledges that the questions it explores can be traced to earlier research in such fields as psychology and linguistics, it is clear that there are strong elements of originality and innovation in this collection of papers.

The book's 11 chapters were contributed by scholars representing a number of disciplines, including linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, education, and communication. Each chapter investigates an aspect of emotion as it relates to the experiences of bilingual and multilingual individuals. The chapter by Pavlenko asks whether speakers of more than one language feel like different people when they use different languages. Mary Besemeres explores the representation and translatability of emotions in the literary memoirs of bilingual writers; Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi explore connections between romantic desire and language learning. Michèle Koven presents a comparative analysis of one speaker's discourse in two different languages. The chapter by Jean-Marc Dewaele investigates the expression of anger, while humour is the focus of the chapter by Jyotsna Vaid. Alexia Panayiotou explores the concepts of guilt and shame cross-linguistically, while Olga Sachs and John Coley explore those of envy and jealousy. The chapter by Jeanette Altarriba discusses the mental representation of emotion words. [End Page 363] Catherine Harris, Jean Berko Gleason, and Ayşe Ayçiçeği investigate physiological responses to emotionally charged expressions in bilingual individuals' two languages. Finally, the chapter by Robert Schrauf and Ramon Durazo-Arvizu explores connections between language, emotion, and memory. Through these chapters, Bilingual Minds succeeds very well in foregrounding numerous emotional facets of language learning and use that have too often remained in the background.

The volume is book-ended by the editor's preface and afterword. The preface serves to orient the reader to the book's origin, topic, and aims, in addition to providing a brief summary of the 11 chapters that follow. The afterword is particularly useful because it summarizes the questions explored in the preceding chapters and offers directions for future research, including suggested research questions and suitable methods of inquiry for studying emotional expression and representation among L2 speakers.

At first glance, the topic of emotions in L2 acquisition and use may seem so highly focused and specialized as to appeal only to a limited audience. Closer inspection makes it clear, however, that the questions explored in Bilingual Minds hold valuable implications not only for linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists but also for literary theorists, translators, and language teachers, among others. In fact, one of the most notable aspects of the book is its potential to appeal to a very broad audience of scholars. This broad appeal is due in part to the originality of the book's topic, the importance of emotions in nearly all aspects of interpersonal communication, and the range of perspectives considered in the various chapters of the book.

Indeed, the broad range of perspectives leads to an unusual degree of variety among the chapters that make up this volume. There is variety not only in the research questions addressed but also in theoretical frameworks, academic disciplines, and research methods. While so much variation might be expected to result in a lack of cohesion, Bilingual Minds manages to succeed in offering a coherent exploration of numerous facets of a single topic.

As noted by Harris, Gleason, and Ayçiçeği, the 'investigation of personal emotional experiences, such as which language feels more emotional, has traditionally been assumed to lie outside the scope of scientific research' (p. 257). But as the book's preface indicates, this situation has already begun to change, and there is little doubt that Bilingual Minds will play an important role in ensuring...

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