Project: Modelling bottom-up and top-down linguistic knowledge across different contexts of bilingual development

Posted on 13 October 2022

Major new research collaboration investigating different contexts of bilingual development

The Department of Language and Linguistic Science is delighted to announce that Prof Monika Schmid has recently been awarded an Open Research Area grant for the project “Modelling bottom-up and top-down linguistic knowledge across different contexts of bilingual development”, to run for 3 years. The project is a collaboration with partners in France (Toulouse, Barbara Köpke) and Germany (Braunschweig, Holger Hopp). The UK part is funded by ESRC, while the partners in the other countries receive funding from ANR and DFG, respectively.

Project Summary

The ability to acquire, maintain and use more than one language is a key component of the human language faculty. This project systematically models how environmental and cognitive factors shape language development across different populations of bilingual speakers.

Using the acquisition and maintenance of grammatical gender in bilingual adults as a lens into linguistic knowledge and processing, this project assesses how input frequency and age of second-language acquisition affect item-specific and rule-based aspects of lexical and grammatical development among French-German and English-German speakers at various stages of language learning. Using a large data set collected in different linguistic environments, the project systematically delineates the scope of cross-linguistic influence and it models the contributions of age of acquisition, frequency of use and language dominance as continuous variables. The project will yield a better understanding of how language development is guided by top-down and bottom-up factors at the intersection of the lexicon and the grammar at different stages throughout the human lifespan. By charting how bilingual experience shapes language knowledge and processing, it provides novel insights into the key theoretical question of the degree and scope to which language learning is subserved by domain-general or domain-specific skills.

“This project arises from an idea that the three of us have been working on for several years now. A pilot study which we started at the beginning of 2020 was unfortunately curtailed by Covid, but the preliminary results were promising. I am extremely excited to be working with Profs. Köpke and Hopp, who are internationally renowned specialists in psycho- and neurolinguistic approaches to bilingual development.” - Prof Monika Schmid, Department of Language and Linguistic Science