The Timecourse of Bilingual Phonologies

Worldwide, bilingualism is the norm, rather than the exception. Bilinguals must acquire two distinct sound systems and be able to use those sound systems to recognize words in two different languages. As a result, the time course of bilingual sound-based acquisition is thus different from that of monolinguals, from their childhood acquisition of phonology, to their adult patterns of production and perception in both languages, to their real-time phonological processing, during lexical activation and competition. This course examines bilingual sound patterns from several perspectives, including bilingual acquisition of phonology in children, bilingual production and perception in adults, and bilingual lexical processing. In the final week, students will collaborate with each other and with participants in Melinda Fricke’s course “Psycholinguistic and Corpus Approaches to Codeswitching” to propose joint experiments based on some aspect of the course.