XVIII Instituto de Lingüística

How do bilinguals build syntactic and semantic representations, given input in each of their two languages? The simplest answer to this question (i.e., bilinguals must be like monolinguals of each of their languages) is invalidated by the available evidence, which suggests that bilinguals process sentences in ways that do not always resemble those of their monolingual counterparts. The linguistic architecture of speakers of more than one language must be posited to include competence repositories for each language. However, the mechanisms bilinguals employ to build representations in real time might be unitary and shared by the two languages (language independent).

This course examines and evaluates existing evidence addressing these questions, by surveying a range of recent work on bilingual sentence processing. The course makes no assumptions about the backgrounds of course participants, and the theoretical and methodological concepts implicit in some of this research will be reviewed, when necessary. Course participants will be encouraged to write proposals outlining the design of new projects, particularly projects examining sentence processing in bilingual and multilingual populations not commonly studied.

The adress of the website for the course is:

http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~efernand/abralin07/

It will have hand-outs, full references for works cited in course, and links to electronic sources for those works. The course web might also be used as a repository for work produced by students during the course, but this will depend on the projects produced by the students.