ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we were tasked to address the question, “What should every cognitive psychologist know about bilingualism?” While there are many potential ways of accomplishing this mission, here we focus on a common narrative of the “ideal speaker” in cognitive psychology, which fails to capitalize on the richness of experiential diversity and history. Crucially, we argue that the myth of the ideal speaker narrative is brought into clear relief by a detailed consideration of at least one critical way that people differ, which is bilingualism, an experience that is shared by more than half of the human population globally, according to some estimates. These experiences have important ramifications for our understanding of human cognition, and in this chapter, we explore this line of reasoning across three different areas of bilingualism research: (1) recent efforts in systematically mapping and quantifying social language experience among bilinguals, (2) studies of bilingualism that emphasize language use within interpersonal social contexts, and (3) studies of bilingualism that emphasize language use within broader cultural contexts.
