23 April 2007
Bilbao Campus
During the last few years, a vast amount of knowledge has been generated on how the human brain works and about its relationship with the different cognitive functions. We are still far from achieving its full understanding, but it has revealed valuable information about the underlying structure of the human language system. However, the proposed models have so far been almost exclusively focused on monolingual speakers. Although monolingualism may seem a priori an ?unmarked? cased, demographic statistics clearly show that the great majority of human beings are multilingual. In addition, most developed societies that have traditionally been considered monolingual (let?s think, for example, of USA, Japan, France, United Kingdom or Germany), are becoming increasingly aware of the need (and benefits) of speaking more than one language.
This has led those countries that have actively defended official monolingual policies to pay growing attention to the mechanisms involved in multilingual acquisition and use. In this conference, hosted by the Psychology of Learning Laboratory, lecturer Sebastián presented the research projects carried out on these issues.
