Lecture by Professor Tony McEnery
Speaker Biography
Professor Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University. He served as Interim Chief Executive and Director of Research at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University. His research uses corpus linguistics to explore theoretical and applied linguistics, including the representation of social groups, swearing, and historical language change. He has built major corpora such as EMILLE (the largest collection of South Asian languages) and the British National Corpus 2014. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts, and was awarded a Changjiang Chair by the Chinese Ministry of Education. He has secured over £10 million in research funding and published extensively across a wide range of leading journals and volumes.
Personal Homepage: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/tony-mcenery
Lecture Time & Venue
Lecture Time: May 12 (Tuesday), 9:00 – 10:00
Lecture Venue: Lecture Hall 136, Teaching Building No. 5, Songjiang Campus
Lecture Title
Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA
Lecture Abstract
In this talk I explore the relationship between learner corpus research and second language acquisition research. I will begin by considering the origins of learner corpus research, noting its roots in smaller scale studies of learner language. This development of learner corpus studies is considered in the broader context of the development of corpus linguistics. I will then consider the aspirations that learner corpus researchers have had to engage with second language acquisition research and explore why, to date, the interaction between the two fields has been minimal. By exploring some of the corpus building practices of learner corpus research, and the theoretical goals of second language acquisition studies, I will identify reasons for this lack of interaction and make proposals for how this situation could be fruitfully addressed.
Lecture by Professor Jason Rothman
Speaker Biography
Professor Jason Rothman is Professor in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He also holds an adjunct professorship at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Nebrija University in Spain. His research examines language acquisition and real-time processing in bi-/multilinguals (especially heritage speakers), and how language experience relates to cognitive and brain outcomes across development. He is the founding editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and has also held leadership roles in major bilingualism publication venues and research groups. He has published extensively in high impact peer reviewed journals, including Nature, Cognition, Applied Psycholinguistics, etc.
Personal Homepage: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-sciences/people/jason-rothman
Lecture Time & Venue
Lecture Time: May 12 (Tuesday), 10:00 – 11:00
Lecture Venue: Lecture Hall 136, Teaching Building No. 5, Songjiang Campus
Lecture Title
Individual differences are revealing, relevant and not random in multilingual language acquisition/processing and related adaptations in neurocognition
Lecture Abstract
While there is great conformity in the grammars of speakers of individual languages and a set of variables that underlie how/why this comes to be, there is also a spectrum of individual differences that defines linguistic performance and competence outcomes across all types of speakers (not only bi-/multilingual ones, but, yes, L1-dominant users as well). Moreover, recent research focusing on potential neurocognitive outcomes related to bi-/multilingualism (cognitive behavioral performance and adaptations to brain structure and function) also displays a spectrum of individual differences. In all cases, individual differences are governed by unique subsets of dynamic variables calibrated to (opportunities for) dual/multiple language engagement. And while we do not fully understand the patterns, they are universally revealing, theoretically and practically relevant on multiple planes and, crucially, not random! The present talk will revolve around two central points falling out from the importance of better understanding the systematicity behind individual differences: (i) the determinism of various internal and external factors—as well as their interactions—contributing to language acquisition, processing and related effects on domain general cognition and brain adaptations and (ii) the problematizing of the utility, if not appropriateness, of default aggregate comparisons as the norm, especially in bi-multilingual research.
