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Bilingual Autobiographical Memory and Aging

Of the many fascinating questions in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, I have always been mesmerized by the issue of bilingual autobiographical memory, largely because personal memory captures a personal world saturated and shaped by culture: cultural schemata, cultural models, cultural logics. As David Rubin and I wrote more than 10 years ago now: “There is a tantalizing array of evidence, from formal and experimental to informal and testimonial, that suggests that becoming bicultural and speaking two languages has the “feel’ of living in two worlds and perhaps of being different persons in those worlds.”  (Schrauf & Rubin, 2003, p. 122).  My explorations of this topic have focused primarily on older adult, Spanish-English, bilingual immigrants, whose lifespans include childhood and adolescence in their native Spanish followed by decades as functional bilinguals using both Spanish and English.  The fact that these participants were older adults led me into an abiding interest in aging and multilingualism, and I had the great good fortune of working with Kees de Bot of Groenigen University in co-editing a volume on multilingualism and aging.

Language Development over the Lifespan / Edition 1

 

De Bot, K. and Schrauf, R.W., eds. (2009) Language development over the lifespan. New York: Routledge.

Language Development Over the Lifespan is a reference resource for those conducting research on language development and the aging process, and a supplementary textbook for courses in applied linguistics/bilingualism programs that focus on language attrition/aging and adult literacy development in second languages. It offers an integrative approach to language development that examines changes in language over a lifetime, organized by different theoretical perspectives, which are presented by well-known international scholars.

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