Overview

ABOUT THE COURSE: The course offers a comprehensive take on the phenomenon of Bilingualism. Bilingualism is a seemingly simple fact of today’s world, but this practice has implications beyond the realm of just communicative needs. Starting from how a society becomes and remains bilingual, the important aspects of a bilingual society, how this impacts many things like social attitude to business strategies and so on to a completely different world of the mind and brain of a bilingual: a wide range of interesting factors make it worthwhile to delve deeper. In order to bring out the various facets of this practice, the course will bring together linguistic, socio-pragmatic, psychological, applied and cognitive significance of this phenomenon. The students will learn about how linguistic and cognitive mechanisms interact in a bilingual mind and how these interactions shape the way the bilingual person processes information at various levels. Also included will be discussion on the topic of effects of bilingualism on general cognitive abilities of a person, be it children or the elderly. Thus, starting with the social factors responsible for bilingualism to the bilingual individual’s language processing and how all this impacts our life at a broader scale, all these topics will be covered in this course. INTENDED AUDIENCE: Undergraduates, Postgraduates, PhD students, Faculty Development ProgrammeINDUSTRY SUPPORT: Industries working in domains related to human cognition, society and language will find this useful.

Syllabus

Week 1: Becoming and being bilingual : Socio-historical aspects: Language contact: reasons and effect; Attitude and acculturation; Markers of a bilingual society: The continuum: Who is a bilingual? fractional and wholistic view of bilingualism; Types of bilinguals; learning pathways for monolinguals Vs bilinguals; bilingual’s language mode; Bicultural bilingual.Bilingualism and multilingualism: some important pointsWeek 2: Bilingual acquisition : Childhood bilingualism; childhood SLA; adult SLAWeek 3: Bilingual cognition : Relativity; color cognition, perception of motion, grammatical categories, spatial language; conceptual transfer. Bilingual memory models; Episodic, semantic and working memory.Week 4: Brain of a bilingual : Cerebral laterality; aphasia & electrophysiological data; laterality in terms of Age of Acquisition, proficiency and control mechanisms; behavioral lateralityWeek 5: Bilingual speech processing : Speech perception, comprehension and production in children and adults; base language effect in categorical perception and speech production.Week 6: Bilingual lexical and sentence processing : Bilingual mental lexicon: phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations; models of lexical access: language selective Vs non-selective hypothesis; Models of bilingual representation and processing: RHM, BIA, BIA+, BIMOLA, Multilink; comprehension: effect of frequency, Age-of-Acquisition, context, priming, cross-language lexical properties.Production: language production models: MLF model, Uniform structure principle, the 4-M model, the abstract level model; selection and control in production; factors affecting production.Sentence processing;reading and writing;Week 7: Cognitive consequences of bilingualism : Consequences of bilingualism: metalinguistic abilities; language control; executive control and cognitive reserve; Consequences of bilingualism: metalinguistic abilities; language control;executive control and cognitive reserve;Week 8: Applied areas : Bilingual education; language planning and policy; language teaching; advertising; current trends in bilingualism research