Bye-lingual IV: when you speak two languages but start to lose vocabulary in both of them - CORPUS EDITION

Course Description

This seminar will focus on understanding what is language attrition and how to research it using a audio dataset from Project Alhea [1].

Language attrition is the gradual loss of a language due to reduced use, without any pathology involved. It cannot be understood without making clear concepts like L1, Mother tongue, L2, FL, and Heritage languages among others. Are all kind of attrition the same? Are attrition and bilingualism always related?

Linguistic and extralinguistic factors, how to ‘measure’ and study them will be address and also used for analysing our data.

Around half of the course will be hands-on, so students will be able to apply the acquired knowledge to the creation and use of the corpus both during some of the sessions and as homework. Students are required to bring a laptop to the sessions (from the 2nd one), in case the student does not own a laptop, please contact the lecturers to find a solution.

International students, and students with special needs ( https://www.hhu.de/en/bbst/translate-to-english-nachteilsausgleich) are very welcome to join.

[1] https://www.ling.hhu.de/en/psycho-neurolinguistics/team/villar-gonzalez/project-alhea

Course Goals:

• (Re)Learn basic theory about bilingualism (/multilingualism) and learn the key aspects of attrition
• Learn how to create a corpus from audio files
• Learn how to work with speech datasets
• How to use this corpus to research Language Attrition
• It is expected the student will improve several soft skills as well, among them:scientific reading (how to read, and understand a scientific paper and/or chapter of a book)summarizing (from reading a text, listening to a talk, .) presentation skills