Bilingualism and Developmental Linguistics research group

Speaker: Mike Sharwood Smith (Heriot-Watt University)

Title: Bilingual systems and the language-blind grammar

Abstract: This talk will consider the limitations of explaining linguistic development and performance in purely structural linguistic terms, in other words without considering the influence of what has been called the ‘internal context’ of linguistic processing (Truscott & Sharwood Smith 2019). This refers to all the other cognitive representations co-activated alongside those that specifically deal with linguistic (grammatical) structure. The talk will assume the perspective of the Modular Cognition Framework. The MCF may be viewed as a tool for, amongst other things, developing more elaborate explanations of both the more regular as well as the dynamic, fluid aspects of any kind of linguistic behaviour. The discussion will proceed as follows: firstly by making some general observations about the mind-brain distinction and the mapping problem (Poeppel 2013), then associating these general points with basic features of the MCF and with the distinction made between ‘linguistic processing Truscott & Sharwood Smith 2019). This refers to all the other cognitive representations co-activated alongside those that specifically deal with linguistic (grammatical) structure. The talk will assume the perspective of the Modular Cognition Framework. The MCF may be viewed as a tool for, amongst other things, developing more elaborate explanations of both the more regular as well as the dynamic, fluid aspects of any kind of linguistic behaviour. The discussion will proceed as follows: firstly by making some general observations about the mind-brain distinction and the mapping problem (Poeppel 2013), then associating these general points with basic features of the MCF and with the distinction made between ‘linguistic’ and ‘language’ processing and then leading on to some examples of crosslinguistic interactions between L1, L2 and L3/n as discussed in the multilingual research literature without elaborating on the conflicting approaches to explaining crosslinguistic influence in L3 due to time limitations!). The talk will end with some summarising conclusions.