ACLC Seminar | Professor Janet Grijzenhout (Leiden University)

One mouth, different languages

Lecture

Janet Grijzenhout, Professor of English Linguistics, Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, is the guest speaker at this ACLC seminar.

Abstract

No natural human language is uniform. Infants need flexibility in the input to establish the range of what counts as, for instance, ‘a stressed syllable’ or ‘a voiceless aspirated stop’. The focus of the present paper is (i) on how bilingual infants deal with variability in the languages that they are acquiring and (ii) on how variability allows post-adolescent bilingual adults to adapt certain phonetic properties in their L1 when they become more proficient speakers of an L2.

Published by  ACLC