| In this dissertation I suggest a new approach to the study of the relationship between language, culture and thought--through the lenses of late bilingualism. The dissertation is structured in the following way: Chapter 1 introduces contemporary approaches to the issue of language and thought, and the theoretical framework proposed, social constructionism, which assumes that language provides its speakers with a way of structuring their experience of themselves and the world, and that the concepts people use are made possible by the languages they speak.;Chapter 2 presents a survey of previous research on bilingualism and cognition and discusses possible contributions from other areas, such as contemporary autobiographical literature.;Chapter 3 describes the subjects and the methodology used in the present study.;Chapter 4 develops a theoretical analysis of conceptual domains of private/personal and lichnoye/chastnoye in American English and Russian speech communities. This analysis demonstrates that the constructs of private and personal differ significantly in the two cultures, and these differences are exhibited discursively. This analysis is subsequently supported by empirical studies with monolingual speakers of each language.;Chapter 5, 6 and 7 present the results of a series of studies where I compared American and Russian monolinguals, Russian-English bilinguals and American and Russian foreign language learners on three tasks involving the concepts of private and personal: word associations, concept definitions and film recalls.;Finally, Chapter 8 presents the conclusions and the implications of the studies. |
