THE BILINGUAL MIND
01:940:368
Prof. Nuria Sagarra
Email: nuria.sagarra@rutgers.edu
Ph #: 856 905 8841
Class time: TBA
Office hrs: TBA
Office: 207 Carpender House (Douglass Campus)
GOAL:
How do bilinguals handle having multiple languages in a single mind? What are the neural underpinnings of bilingual processing? Why do
adults have difficulty achieving native-like competence in a foreign language? Why do some people learn foreign languages more easily
than others? What are the general consequences of bilingualism for cognition, language and thought? This course is aimed at
undergraduate students with interest in cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and bilingualism who wish to better
understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the bilingual mind. Prereqs: SPA 261, or Psychology 101 or permission of the
instructor.
COURSE MATERIALS:
Students do not need to purchase any book. Class materials will be made available through sakai.
COMMUNICATION:
Both the teacher and the students are responsible for checking email every 48 hrs, except on the weekends and spring break.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
1. Participation (10%):
Active participation is essential in this course, and depends on attendance as well as involvement during classroom discussions and
presentations by other students. To derive the utmost benefit from the course, regular attendance is essential. Failure to attend class
results in missed opportunities to participate in classroom discussions. A student whose irregular attendance causes him or her, in the
judgment of the instructor, to become deficient scholastically, may run the risk of receiving a lower grade than the student might have
secured had the student been in regular attendance. Students who miss a class are responsible for contacting other classmates to obtain
any missed information.
2. Discussion questions (10%:):
We will read 12 empirical articles for the course. Students will email Prof. Sagarra and the discussion leader (not the rest of the students)
2 questions per article on the day indicated in the syllabus. General questions that could be made about any study or technique are not
accepted. The goal of the questions is to clarify concepts and generate class discussion.
3. Discussion leader (20%):
For each topic in the syllabus, Prof. Sagarra will cover the theory, and a discussion leader present an empirical study related to that topic.
Students will be discussion leaders once, and students will choose their empirical study the first week of class. Presentations will be 20
minutes long. Because all students will have already read the study, the goal is to summarize the study (enough to refresh their memory)
and organize the questions the leader received from his/her peers. Therefore, the leader’s objective is to generate discussion, not to
provide an exhaustive summary of the study. Examples of leaders’ presentations will be provided in Sakai.
4. Summary of talks on bilingualism (15%: 5% per talk):
Students will receive a list of talks related to bilingualism offered by several departments. They are asked to attend three of these talks.
For each talk, students are asked to turn in a 100-150-word summary and a 100-150-word proposal of a follow-up study in relation to the
talk. Students will turn in a paper copy of their summary at the beginning of the class following the talk.
5. Research project (40 %):
Students will write a paper about a proposed project. Projects do not involve data collection, and are based on new and original ideas
based on one of the topics covered in class. All text should be Times New Roman 12-point and double spaced (2.0), and should follow the
APA guidelines. Papers will be 15-pages long, excluding references, tables and figures. Papers will consist of the following parts:
1. title (1 p)
2. abstract (see APA for length) (1 p)
3. introduction (1 p)
4. background (8 pp)
5. the study (research questions and hypotheses: 1 p)
6. Methods: participants, materials (2 pp)
7. Procedure (1 p)
8. References (no limit of pp)
9. Tables, figures, if needed (no limit of pp)
6. Presentation of research project (5 %):
The last days of class, students will give a 15-minute presentation about their project. Presentations will consist of three parts: (1)
introduction, background, research questions, hypotheses (5 minutes); (2) materials and procedure (5 minutes); questions for other
students to generate discussion (5 minutes). At the end, students can ask questions about the study.
Area
Introduction
Techniques
Wk
1
2
3
Cognitive
factors
Language use
factors
Biological and
linguistic
factors
Cognitive
effects
Linguistic
effects
Conclusion
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Content
Introduction to the bilingual mind. Myths about bilingualism.
Behavioral and neurocognitive techniques to investigate bilingualism, with particular emphasis on eye-tracking
and event-related potentials.
Visit to the Eye-tracking and Language Processing Lab (Rutgers - New Brunswick).
Visit to the Language Behavior and Brain Imaging Lab (Rutgers – Newark).
Selective attention: Working memory.
Selective attention: Declarative and procedural memory.
Selective attention: Inhibitory control.
Shallow Processing model.
Unified Competition model .
Associative Learning model.
Neurolinguistic and neurocomputational models.
Natural order and limited capacity models: early models, Processability model, Input Processing model .
Age effects.
Deficit models: Representational Deficit model.
Accessibility models: e.g., FTFA, Missing Inflection, Feature reassembling.
13
Metalinguistic abilities and executive control.
Language and thought. Native language attrition.
Language contact and change (language convergence, code switching).
14
Conclusion and presentation of student research projects.