Foreign language and mother tongue

This highly original and innovative book is a must-read for all interested in the complex relationships between bilingualism and conceptual development, and between one’s first (L1) and second language (L2). While these relationships have been at the center of atten-tion in the fields of bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) for a long time, until recently most SLA researchers had focused on the study of L1 transfer, or the influence of one’s first language on the learning and use of subsequent languages. The literature on L2 influence on L1 and on bidirectional transfer remained scarce until the last decade, when several scholars pointed out that the stable “nativeness ” of the first language may not be as immutable as usually presumed (cf. Cook, 1992; Major, 1992; Waas, 1996). Arguing against the mono-lingual bias in SLA and bilingualism research, these scholars emphasized that all bilinguals — including L2 users who had learned their L2 post puberty — may behave differently from monolingual speakers of either language and have to be considered as unique speakers-hearers with a distinct type of linguistic competence (Cook,1992; Grosjean, 1998). In agreement with this view, the study of language transfer embraced investigations of L2 influ-ence on L1 in adulthood (cf. Major, 1992; Waas, 1996). The research in this area suggeste