Not only the quantity matters: the importance of quality of input in language development

February 1, 2017 by

Sharon Unsworth talks about linguistic input in bilingual development

Post by Michela Bonfieni

Last week, the Linguistic Circle at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS) at the University of Edinburgh hosted a talk by Sharon Unsworth, Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the Radboud University, the Netherlands. Born in Lancashire, Unsworth completed her PhD in Utrecht with a dissertation on the differences between adults and children in language acquisition. Aside from teaching, she is now the head of a research project exploring the cognitive and developmental aspects of multilingualism.

Sharon Unsworth’s research is aimed investigating which factors contribute to the successful acquisition of two or more languages in childhood. [Read more…]

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Do young children know that people can understand more than one language?

March 9, 2015 by

Can infants understand that people might be able speak more than one language, and are bilingual infants more likely to understand this than a monolingual ones? These are interesting questions, because understanding that people may speak more than one language is likely to help infants adapt more easily to their linguistic environments, and help them interact more easily with other people.

Researchers at New York University and McGill University recently explored these questions by observing how bilingual and monolingual 20 month-olds reacted to communicative situations. [Read more…]

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