The Montreal Bilingualism Initiative symposium at CPA!
In June, MoBI headed to Toronto for the Canadian Psychological Association’s 84th annual convention. Check out the abstract for our symposium called Multilingualism across the lifespan: Research from the Montreal Bilingualism Initiative:
Current estimates suggest that approximately 43% of people globally are fluently bilingual. While research over the last half-century has advanced our understanding of language processing and its neural underpinnings, much remains unknown about how social forces play a role. The Montréal Bilingualism Initiative (MoBI; /mobi/) is an interdisciplinary team of investigators addressing the factors – from infancy to older adulthood – that support multilingual proficiency. In this symposium, we selectively present research from MoBI. The first talk examines the “Effect of linguistic environment on second language speakers' prosodic production over and above proficiency effects” (presented by Annie Gilbert, Shari Baum, Debra Titone, 91˿Ƶ). The second talk examines “The Use of Visual Speech Cues and Sentence Context in Bilingual Speech Perception in Noise” (presented by Kalista Sedemedes & Natalie Phillips, Concordia University). The final talk is titled, Refined ”Chaos Raffiné: When Bilingual Adults Learn Novel Words in a Multilingual Iterated Learning Task” (presented by Vegas Hodgins, Pauline Palma, Chaima El Mouslih, & Debra Titone, 91˿Ƶ). With this select overview of MoBI research, we offer a unique perspective on the social context of multilingualism – nudging our discipline towards a more nuanced understanding of multilingualism.