Negotiating multilingualism in situations of conflict

The purpose of the study is to understand how different types of political conflict (violent vs. non-violent) affect language processing in bilingual speakers. We will compare language processing in Ukrainian-Russian and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals before and after escalation of the conflict: (a) in Catalonia before and after the 2017 independence referendum and (b) in Ukraine before and after the Russian invasion of 2022. In both settings, a majority of the population is proficient in two typologically related languages that differ in terms of (a) international status and historical prestige (higher for Spanish and Russian) and (b) present-day attitudes (often negative towards Spanish and Russian). The difference is in the nature of the political conflict: non-violent in Catalonia and violent in Ukraine. We hypothesize that the war in Ukraine has led to stronger inhibition of Russian for many speakers, similar to the effects of emotional trauma, and that this will lead to diminished accessibility of Russian lexical items, potentially causing language attrition (loss). For the Catalan speakers, we expect the processing patterns to reflect language dominance and use, rather than individual attitudes and experiences. 

We will address the following research questions:

RQ1: Can patterns of bilingual lexical access in different languages be disrupted under conditions of political conflict?

RQ2: What is the impact of different types of conflict (legislative/regulatory vs. military)?

RQ3: How do individual attitudes modulate lexical access under these conditions?

RQ4: How do pre-existing patterns of language use and dominance modulate lexical access?

RQ5: What is the consequence of disruption of language processing to identity formation?

RQ6: What is the consequence of such disruption for language attrition/maintenance?