The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, along with the Heritage Vowels and Agreement Project, is hosting a virtual talk by Elena Nicoladis, who is a faculty member in psychology at the University of Alberta. She primarily works on bilingual L1 acquisition, especially with respect to morphology and the lexicon, as well as adjacent areas of developmental psychology. Her talk, "Weak vocabulary = lots of gestures? Evidence from bilingual children," will be taking place virtually on Friday, March 19, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM. Registration can be found here.
Bilingual children often have lower scores on vocabulary tests within one language than monolingual children. Their cognitive development is, however, age-appropriate. Given that they have more complex thoughts than their language skills might allow them to convey, might they use gestures to help convey their message? Among monolinguals, gestures can be used to help construct the message a speaker wishes to communicate and access words to go along with that message. In this talk, I review evidence from some of my studies with bilingual children that address that question.
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