Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language,as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Monoglottism or,more commonly,monolingualism or unilingualism,is the condition of being able to speak only a single language,as opposed to multilingualism. In a different context,"unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which enforces an official or national language over others.
Second-language acquisition (SLA),sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2acquisition,is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines,such as psychology and education.
Simultaneous bilingualism is a form of bilingualism that takes place when a child becomes bilingual by learning two languages from birth. According to Annick De Houwer,in an article in The Handbook of Child Language,simultaneous bilingualism takes place in "children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from before the age of two and who continue to be regularly addressed in those languages up until the final stages" of language development. Both languages are acquired as first languages. This is in contrast to sequential bilingualism,in which the second language is learned not as a native language but a foreign language.
Bilingualism,a subset of multilingualism,means having proficiency in two or more languages. A bilingual individual is traditionally defined as someone who understands and produces two or more languages on a regular basis. A bilingual individual's initial exposure to both languages may start in early childhood,e.g. before age 3,but exposure may also begin later in life,in monolingual or bilingual education. Equal proficiency in a bilingual individuals' languages is rarely seen as it typically varies by domain. For example,a bilingual individual may have greater proficiency for work-related terms in one language,and family-related terms in another language.
Laura-Ann Petitto is a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist known for her research and scientific discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees,the biological bases of language in humans,especially early language acquisition,early reading,and bilingualism,bilingual reading,and the bilingual brain. Significant scientific discoveries include the existence of linguistic babbling on the hands of deaf babies and the equivalent neural processing of signed and spoken languages in the human brain. She is recognized for her contributions to the creation of the new scientific discipline,called educational neuroscience. Petitto chaired a new undergraduate department at Dartmouth College,called "Educational Neuroscience and Human Development" (2002-2007),and was a Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation and Dartmouth's Science of Learning Center,called the "Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience" (2004-2007). At Gallaudet University (2011–present),Petitto led a team in the creation of the first PhD in Educational Neuroscience program in the United States. Petitto is the Co-Principal Investigator as well as Science Director of the National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center,called the "Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2)". Petitto is also founder and Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (“BL2”) at Gallaudet University.
Virginia Yip (葉彩燕),is a Hong Kong linguist and writer. She is director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. She is a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include bilingual language acquisition,second language acquisition,Cantonese,Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar,psycholinguistics,and cognitive science.
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the different ways in which one language can affect another within an individual speaker. It typically involves two languages that can affect one another in a bilingual speaker. An example of CLI is the influence of Korean on a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese or French. Less typically,it could also refer to an interaction between different dialects in the mind of a monolingual speaker. CLI can be observed across subsystems of languages including pragmatics,semantics,syntax,morphology,phonology,phonetics,and orthography. Discussed further in this article are particular subcategories of CLI—transfer,attrition,the complementarity principle,and additional theories.
Heritage language learning,or heritage language acquisition,is the act of learning a heritage language from an ethnolinguistic group that traditionally speaks the language,or from those whose family historically spoke the language. According to a commonly accepted definition by Valdés,heritage languages are generally minority languages in society and are typically learned at home during childhood. When a heritage language learner grows up in an environment with a dominant language that is different from their heritage language,the learner appears to be more competent in the dominant language and often feels more comfortable speaking in that language. "Heritage language" may also be referred to as "community language","home language",and "ancestral language".
Carmen Silva-Corvalán is a Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Southern California,where she taught since she obtained her doctoral degree at the University of California,Los Angeles in 1979. Silva-Corvalán has published extensively on bilingualism and language contact,and on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic constraints which condition syntactic variation. Silva-Corvalan was one of the four chief editors of Bilingualism:Language and Cognition,Cambridge University Press.
With the amount of bilinguals increasing worldwide,psycholinguists have begun to look at how the brain represents multiple languages. The mental lexicon is a focus of research on differences between monolingual and multilingual brains.
Ruth Berman is an Israeli linguist,Professor Emerita,Tel Aviv University,where she held the chair in “Language across the Lifespan.”Berman's research deals with the morphology,syntax,and lexicon of Modern Hebrew,first language acquisition in cross-linguistic perspective,later language development,and development of narrative and text construction abilities from early childhood across adolescence and adulthood.
Heather Goad is a Canadian linguist. Her research explores areas of phonology and language acquisition,especially investigating the shapes of phonological systems,including contrasts in English,French,Korean,Portuguese,Italian and Nepali,as well as the developmental paths of acquiring speech sounds by first and second language learners.
Cornelis Kees de Bot is a Dutch linguist. He is currently the chair of applied linguistics at the University of Groningen,Netherlands,and at the University of Pannonia. He is known for his work on second language development and the use of dynamical systems theory to study second language development.
Erika Hoff is a developmental psychologist and an expert on language development and bilingualism. She is a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University,where she directs the Language Development Laboratory.
Johanne Catherine Paradis is a language scientist and expert on bilingual language development. She is Professor of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta,where she directs the Language Acquisition Lab and the Child English Second Language (CHESL) Center.
Marilyn May Vihman is an American linguist known for her research on phonological development and bilingualism in early childhood. She holds the position of Professor of Linguistics at the University of York.
Hrafnhildur Hanna Ragnarsdóttir is professor emerita in Developmental and Educational Science at the University of Iceland. Her research is concerned with long-term language development and its relation to cognition,social-emotional development and literacy. Her primary research focus has been on the development of vocabulary,grammar,and narratives in early childhood and the first school years and on later language development as it appears in oral vs/written text construction and in narratives vs/expository texts from middle grades through adolescence and into adulthood.
Rosemarie Tracy is a German linguist specializing in language acquisition. She is currently senior professor of English linguistics at the University of Mannheim.
Caroline F. Rowland is a British psychologist known for her work on child first language development,grammar acquisition,and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016,she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
