Event Details

Language Regulation as a Path to Bilingual Resilience

Bilingual speakers actively negotiate competition between their two languages. How that process happens and the consequences that result have been an active focus of research in the last three decades of research. Although cross-language competition has been observed for all language pairings and at different points of achieving proficiency in each language, it is only recently that the variation in bilingual experience has been shown to determine how bilingual speakers come to dynamically regulate the use of each language. Some bilingual speakers learn and use the two languages separately, others live in bilingual communities in which most speakers use the same two languages, and some find themselves immersed in contexts in which only one of their two languages is spoken. Variation across bililinguals reflects not only their paths to learning and using the two languages but also the impact of the environments in which they are embedded. In this talk, I argue that the dynamics of language regulation come to change each of the bilingual’s two languages and by doing so produce cognitive and neural resillience.

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