Ling 447 Bilingualism

Course Description:

This course provides a general introduction to the study of bilingualism.

We will try to understand what bilingualism is, the field of bilingualism research linguistics is and we will cover the major questions regarding bilingualism.

How do we process two languages? Why do we easily adjust to a speaker with a foreign accent? How do young children come to speak the language to which they are exposed? Why is it difficult to learn a second language as an adult? Is it possible to speak two languages at the same time? What are the mechanisms that allow the brain to monitor the juggling between two languages? Is it possible to selectively lose one language due to brain damage? Or switch pathologically between to languages? Is it possible for a native language to fade away? In this course we will examine the linguistic and cognitive processes engaged by language use. Topics to be covered include speech perception, word recognition, representation of word meaning, comprehension of sentences, spoken production of words and sentences. In addition, we will consider the various subfields and experimental approaches that used to study bilingualism research, i.e., psycholinguist, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics and language variation,

Classes will be a combination of lectures, discussions, lab visits, and group work.