March 23, 2019

Guest speaker: Danielle Thomas (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

OISE and the UTM Department of Language Studies are co-hosting a talk by Danielle Thomas, an alumna of their Ph.D. program who is now a Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is interested in L2 learning, Spanish, and morphosyntactic phenomena in bi- and multilingualism, especially inter-speaker variation. Her talk, "Internal and external induced variability in bilingualism: Evidence from the sounds and structure of Spanish", will be taking place in OISE 11-164, Tuesday March 26, at 10:00 AM.

The observation and empirical study of the language behaviour of bilinguals has led to a variety of models aiming to explain why bilinguals often exhibit variable patterns of knowledge and use for certain linguistic domains as compared to monolinguals. These models propose a variety of internal and external factors associated with language learning and use at different ages to explain this variability. This talk will present the results from two empirical studies comparing the patterns of phonetic and morphosyntactic behaviour among different groups of Spanish and English speakers, including monolinguals, early (heritage) bilinguals, and late (L2) bilinguals. The goal of these studies was to examine the type of variability exhibited by bilingual speakers (if any) compared to monolinguals as a way to test models that have proposed to explain bilingual variability as the result of internal and external-induced effects (e.g. contact-induced effects, age-related effects). The results of these studies are discussed in terms of a typological approach to language behaviour in bilingualism where bilingual variability is indicative of systematic linguistic and/or cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals, or it is indicative of a bilingual’s systematic understanding of how to vary language in ways that are both appropriate to the language-specific system and to a dynamic communicative reality.

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