Dartmouth Events

 

Abstract:  Speaking a language is remarkable, but commonplace, feat. Almost as commonplace, but even more remarkable is speaking more than one language: bilinguals need to deal with two different sets of words and grammars, and a large body of research has investigated how the brain represents two languages and how separate or intertwined these representations are. What happens when a person knows two languages that operate in different modalities: a spoken language, like English or Spanish, and a signed language, like American Sign Language or Spanish Sign Language? This is a rare form of bilingualism – relatively few people get the opportunity to learn a sign language – but one that raises all sorts of questions about how language is shaped by its modality, and how this impacts the way that language is represented in the brain. In this talk, I will review a series of studies that we have carried out with bimodal bilinguals of Spanish and Spanish Sign Language, using a variety of techniques (behavioural, eye-tracking and magnetoencephaolography-MEG). The results demonstrate that, on the one hand, bimodal bilinguals show the same underlying mechanisms of language representation and control as common-or-garden spoken language bilinguals, while, on the other hand, differences between speech and sign translate into differences in how each language is processed by the brain, highlighting that modality does indeed shape language structure and representation.