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Reexamining Linguistic Relativity: What Adult Bilinguals Can Teach Us About Culture, Language, And Cognition, Natalya Petroff
Reexamining Linguistic Relativity: What Adult Bilinguals Can Teach Us About Culture, Language, And Cognition, Natalya Petroff
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Extending Whorf's popular notion of linguistic relativity (LR) to bilingual contexts, one would argue that a speaker's first language (L1) influences her thinking and behavior under second language (L2) conditions. According to one interpretation of LR, inter-language relativity, L1 instills in its speakers habitual ways of thinking and thus influences their perception and categorization in L2 contexts. Under intra-speaker relativity, bilinguals follow either L1 or L2 patterns of performance, depending on L2 proficiency. Finally, according to usage-based accounts of language, there is no qualitative difference between mono- and bilingual speakers, and a bilingual's performance under L2 conditions is best viewed …