This course introduces theoretical and methodological issues in the study of bilingualism. The first half of the course focuses on bilingual acquisition in early childhood. We examine how children develop two languages in families where they are exposed to dual input from birth. The issues covered include language differentiation, cross-linguistic influence and code-mixing in bilingual development. Data from the language development of children acquiring Chinese and English, as well as other language pairs will be used for illustration. The second half of the course focuses on the neurocognitive and computational mechanisms of bilingual representation and processing. We discuss how neuroimaging methods and computational modeling help to provide insights into the developmental processes and the representation in the bilingual mind and brain. The issues covered include lexical-semantic representation, bilingual language control, age of acquisition and its interaction with language proficiency, L2 experience-induced neuroplasticity, and individual differences in second language learning.

Required textbook:
The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism by Francois Grosjean and Ping Li (2013).