ABSTRACT
Bilingualism has become an omnipresent phenomenon in our modern society of large-scale migration, international markets and finance, backpacking youngsters, and a scientific community in need of a lingua franca to disseminate its achievements among its members. The awareness that bilingualism is not at all exceptional any more and may not have been so for a long time has recently led to a steep growth in the number of studies on the implications of being bilingual for language use and cognition in general. This book brings together the results of many of these studies. It presents the theories and views on bilingualism that motivated these studies and emerged from them, but it also explains the research methods and tasks that were used to address these theories and views in specific experiments. Because of this latter feature this book qualifies as an introduction to the study of bilingualism. However, it presupposes some basic knowledge of the research area of cognitive psychology and, specifically, the psychology of language (or “psycholinguistics”). The issues that will be dealt with are largely based on those addressed in the study of psycholinguistics, but they are approached from the perspective of bilingual language users.
