My 6 year-old daughter has now spent a total of 9 months in Korea. She now speaks fluent Korean, but I often wonder whether she thinks and dreams in Korean or English.
The other day, she hurt her finger on a toy and screamed, “Ow!”
At least I know at a reflex level, she’s still English-wired. The expression of pain in Korean would have been “A-ya!” (??!)
How you doing? We miss you back here.
I imagine there’s more recent research on this, but here’s a decent place to start.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Writings/Papers/InternalUses.htm
Corey – that’s a nice find! So research does seem to suggest that pain/sadness is usually expressed in the first language. What’s more interesting about the study however is that there is no definitive case of use of one language over the other, and most subjects used both depending on circumstances, even while dreaming. Wow.