Vendredi 6 février 2026

Séminaire LPL

Laura Bosch

(University of Barcelona)

Adaptation to a bilingual input and variability in early language acquisition

A 10h30 en salle de conférences B011 au LPL, Aix-en-Provence

Evènement ouvert à tout le monde

Résumé :
Infants and children growing up in bilingual/multilingual environments should no longer be considered as exceptions to the norm, even for those living in monolingual societies. But bilingualism is a broad construct, covering a diversity of dual language exposure contexts, modulated by differential properties of socio-educational environments and language typologies. Adequately addressing the heterogeneous nature of bilingual language acquisition remains challenging. Research developed in the last twenty-five years, reflects important changes in the type of questions that have been addressed: from an initial focus on early language differentiation issues, to more recent studies focusing on the identification of adaptive mechanisms, understanding variability in acquisition, and getting more nuanced views on the processes that lead to building separate but interconnected language systems from a dual language input. In this talk, I will first summarize studies based on infants simultaneously exposed to close language pairs (e.g., Spanish and Catalan), and I will then contrast these studies with data obtained from populations exposed to more distant languages. Language proximity stands out as a factor likely to modulate acquisition in such domains as phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic acquisition. The talk will successively cover two separate but interconnected areas: the early building of native language phonetic/phonological categories, and word-learning strategies in dual vocabulary building.  This narrow focus might contribute to identify research questions that remain open for future studies on early bilingualism.

Cet évènement fait partie des séminaires du LPL ayant lieu tous les 1ers vendredis du mois 2025/2026.