After completion of the course, students should be able to discuss recent psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic developments in the domain of multilingualism. They should also understand the rationale underlying recent studies in terms of their methodological, theoretical, and modelling aspects. Finally, the course will train skills of critical reflection on the literature by requiring essay questions and leading a student-led session on one specific research theme.

Neuroscientific and (psycho)linguistic approaches to multilingualism and second language acquisition are considered to characterize how people read, listen, speak, and learn multiple languages. Processes and representations are described at sublexical (phonemic and syllabic), lexical, syntactic, semantic, and dialogue levels. The focus of the course lies on a still-unresolved but central question: Since languages sometimes help each other and sometimes fight each other during processing, what determines the balancing act between the various languages in the multilingual mind? An in-depth understanding of this issue requires a consideration of the types of stimulus materials and research techniques in use, the effects of age of acquisition, and the available bilingual models of language (non)selective access and executive control. Complex issues like word translation and foreign-accented speech are informative here as well.

In alternation with the teachers’ lectures, students will contribute to the specific “topic of the week” (introduced by the lecturer in the first meeting of a week) by designing a student-led activity during the second meeting in a week. This can be a ‘traditional’, in-depth presentation of individual studies / articles, but can also be a mini-experiment, a data set analysis, a demonstration or similar. Students will form pairs to design and lead such an activity, in consultation with the respective teacher. The grade for this activity is a pass/fail, and will be mostly reliant on creativity and quality of preparation than on perfect execution.

Course literature will be announced on Brightspace in due course.