The similar but different paths to acquiring one or more languages

In this talk, I will walk you through the earliest stages of bilingualism, and we will see that it is a process that begins prenatally. I will present evidence showing that young bilingual infants go through the same milestones of language acquisition as their monolingual peers, and will discuss some of the strategies that allow them to simultaneously acquire two language systems and maintain them apart.

Irene de la Cruz-Pavía is a researcher at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (Spain) and a member of the research group The Bilingual Mind, as well as Research Fellow at the Basque Foundation for Science Ikerbasque (Spain). Dr. de la Cruz-Pavía obtained her PhD in Linguistics at the UPV/EHU, and continued her research career at the University of British Columbia (Canada), the Université de Paris (France), and the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy). Her research investigates how humans process language throughout their lifespan, with a strong focus on bilingualism. In her work, she examines humans’ abilities to process various types of linguistic structures from early infancy to old age, in order to further our knowledge of how we acquire and process the grammar of our languages. She is currently leading a project in which she investigates the cognitive consequences of being bilingual.