More about me
- Bilingual background
- Brief timeline of academic career (including side trips)
- Materials from NIH AAE Workgroup at UMass Amherst
- Find references at Google Scholar
My bilingual story.
Personal Fascination and Professional Interest
My own interest in bilingual development is both personal and professional. I was not raised bilingually myself. I first became bilingual as a university exchange student. Maybe it was just the magic of being twenty years old in Paris, but I felt transformed when I discovered a larger world through living in another language.
Because I could speak to the French in their language, I heard stories from people whose unique lives I would never have been able to imagine at home in New York. Somehow I found myself more outgoing when I was speaking French and even surprised myself by writing poetry in that language—which is not something I typically did in English.
Although I was technically beyond the age for learning a second language like a native speaker, I was often mistaken for one. It felt like winning a medal in the language Olympics—bronze if I was taken for someone from a province in France, and silver if the listener thought I was Swiss. (Gold would have been passing for a Parisian. I never won that one.)
(RBC, p. xvi)