When
Sarah Phillips
Assistant Professor
Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT)
University of Arizona
Using distributions to develop a model of language differentiation
Abstract: The bilingual learner must discriminate between languages in their exposure as they develop the grammatical knowledge for each language. While a great deal of research investigates how bilingual language control (i.e., the ability to use only one language during discourse) may enhance cognitive functions (e.g., attention, working memory), little is known about how bilinguals are able to segregate input using elements within the speech stream to develop differentiated language grammars. I will present some completed work and work planned for my lab (the Bilingual Acquisition and Processing Systems [BAPS] Lab) using artificial language learning paradigms to develop a model of language differentiation.