4th International Symposium on Bilingualism

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The National Science Foundation supports the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. The symposium will be held at Arizona State University from April 30 to May 3, 2003. The symposium is concerned with the scientific study of bilingualism, defined as the simultaneous use or representation of two or more languages by an individual or community. Topics representative of previous meetings of the International Symposium on Bilingualism include grammatical development in bilingual children; sociolinguistic and grammatical studies of codeswitching, or language mixture; bilingual speech processing; language disorders in bilinguals; sociolinguistic studies of bilingual communities and migration; child second language acquisition; language policy; language shift; language attrition/forgetting; and bilingualism in school settings. The meeting will provides a forum for linguists and other cognitive scientists to disseminate basic research on bilingualism, receive input from other researchers on current projects and findings, meet with potential collaborators to discuss projects of mutual interest, meet with editors and publishers, engage in discussion of ongoing theoretical and empirical problems, and promote the field of bilingualism as a specific subfield of linguistic research. Bilingualism is a topic of great social and scientific importance. A large proportion of U.S. citizens identify themselves as bilingual, and bilinguals are known to exhibit special characteristics of interest to cognitive scientists as well as to educators and clinicians. Yet relatively little cognitive research has been done on this population. The International Symposium on Bilingualism is an opportunity to promote the study of bilingualism in the U.S. and abroad, and to encourage cognitive science research in a potentially rich but under-investigated area.