| Mission statement The research programme on multilingualism focuses on how human beings acquire and use more than one language and how proficient they become as multilingual speakers. Focus In this newly developed programme there are two areas of special interest. The sub-programme on second language acquisition studies second language development and proficiency from both a structural and a cognitive point of view, in direct relation to the impact of the first language. The aim is to explain the construction and architecture of a second language and its dependency on properties of the first language and/or cognitive structures or preferences. The second sub-programme, on bilingual usage and processing, studies the direct interaction between languages or language varieties in their actual use and the way these languages are processed. The aim is to explain how different languages can compete and/or cooperate in language use and in language processing and how this helps us to understand the basic structures in human language and cognition. To achieve this aim, various multilingual populations will be studied, with various L1 and L2 backgrounds, and with various proficiency levels. Research on bi- or multilingualism is embedded in a wider wider Nijmegen context in which the study of bilingualism is carried out in a multidisciplinary perspective. The other partners are the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, the Nijmegen Institute on Cognition and Information, the Institute for Behavioural Science, and the F.C. Donders Institute (Neuroscience). Research on bilingualism has won a prominent place on the (inter)national research agenda in the last two decades. New journals have come out, new international conferences have been organised, and special research funds have become available (cf. the programme on Multilingualism and Language Acquisition of the Dutch national research organisation NWO, in which Nijmegen acquired two research projects). From a societal point of view, knowledge on multilingual development and proficiency is a topic with a wide and large impact. Worldwide communication today is dominated by bilinguals and the European language policy is based on the concept of European citizens speaking more than one language. On the national level, each year billions of euros are invested in secondary schools to teach pupils to speak more languages. The role of databases has grown significantly in the field field of multilingualism and language acquisition. The research programme on multilingualism includes a special project on bilingual databases, in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute, the Meertens Institute, and Tilburg University. The line of developing and exploiting data resources will be continued, including the (meta)analysis of (longitudinal) databases on school achievements and language proficiency which have become available in the Dutch research context over the past years. Subprogrammes: 1. Second language acquisition: development and proficiency The core issue in this sub-programme is determining the developmental stages in multilingual language acquisition, in early and late second language acquisition, both in relation to proficiency and to the information encoded in the linguistic signal. A main field of research in the coming years is the develo development and performance of low-educated adult language learners. Research will be done in cooperation with Tilburg University. This group of learners is the largest group of second language learners worldwide. Main research topic is their morpho-syntactic development. We want to start research on the impact of low-level phonetic-phonological problems on specific morpho-syntactic acquisition hurdles and we want to investigate how we can combine the definition of proficiency levels and morpho-syntactic and lexical development. The second core issue is directed towards the intera interaction between the linguistic and cognitive system in the perspective of acquiring a second language. Does cognitive organisation related to the L1 affect the ultimate attainment levels of the L2 learner? The field of analysis is the way how languages organise temporal referential information. A similar concern is the relationship between the structure of languages and co-speech gestures, particularly with regard to the development and use of rhetorical style in a second language. The third theme focuses on language proficiency issues issues and ranges from primary school children to university students. We want to investigate which factors determine the levels of proficiency attained, on the basis of larger databases which have become available over the past years (e.g., the performance of dialect speakers in the so-called prima-cohort database). We want to expand our research on the performance of university students, with a focus on academic writing in a foreign language. 2. Bilingual usage and processing The issue addressed in this sub-programme is how more or less stable multilinguals (with varying degrees of proficiency in their respective languages) combine their various competences in actual language use. A number of research questions come to the fore in this sub-programme. â ¢ Can we link processes of contact-induced language chan change and convergence to patterns of interference in bilingual speech? â ¢ How can the stabilised results of interference congeal into into ethnolects? â ¢ How do stable multilingual speakers access the lexicon and and the grammar in their various languages, in online language processing? â ¢ What patterns of mixture do we find in multilingual mixe mixed speech and how can we account for the mixing from a processing perspective? |
