For this spring's Second Language Studies lecture series, Giuli Dussias from Penn State University will headline a talk about the consequences of bilingualism, focusing on syntactic and morpho-syntactic processing. She aims to show how even minimal exposure to a second language can influence syntactic processing in the native language. Dussias believes that this research has the potential to challenge views about the permeability of the first language system.
pass code: 525744
See abstract below:
In this talk, I will discuss the consequences of bilingualism, focusing primarily on syntactic and morpho-syntactic processing, with the goal of illustrating how exposure to a second, even for a brief period, can influence syntactic processing in the native language. The influence of the native language system on the acquisition and processing of a second language has long been noted, but the reverse has not been recognized until relatively recently. Although more research has examined bilingual language interactions for words than for sentences, recent studies show that at the syntactic level, the bilingual’s two languages are also open to one another in a manner far more permeable than we might have predicted, demonstrating that the native language system adapts flexibly to the linguistic environment and the cultural context in which bilinguals use their two languages. I will also discuss work on processing mixed language and its implications for models of language processing, for our understanding of how bilinguals manage to negotiate their two languages, and for existing assumptions about the plasticity of cognitive and neural representations. The aim is to show that research on sentence processing in speakers of two languages has the potential to lead to significant changes in the conceptualization of the mind and in current views about the permeability of the first language system.
This lecture is sponsored by:
The Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The Department of French and Italian
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
The Department of Slavic and East European Literatures and Cultures
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures
