The Multilingual Mind: A Modular Processing Perspective

Description

Language lies at the heart of the way we think, communicate and view the world. Most people on this planet are in some sense multilingual. The Multilingual Mind explores, within a processing perspective, how languages share space and interact in our minds. The mental architecture proposed in this volume permits research across many domains in cognitive science to be integrated and explored within one explanatory framework, recasting compatible insights and findings in terms of a common set of terms and concepts. The MOGUL framework has already proven effective for shedding light on the relationship between processing and learning, metalinguistic knowledge, consciousness, optionality, crosslinguistic influence, the initial state, 'UG access', ultimate attainment, input enhancement, and even language instruction. This groundbreaking work will be essential reading for linguists working in language acquisition, multilingualism, and language processing, as well as for those working in related areas of psychology, neurology and cognitive science.

Michael Sharwood Smith is Emeritus Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University. He is also the founding editor of the journal Second Language Research. John Truscott is a Professor at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and has extensive experience teaching English as a foreign language, along with classes in linguistics, psychology and language teaching.

'An immensely interesting treatment of the bilingual mind, full of important ideas about the cognitive systems that support the acquisition and use of language.' William O'Grady, University of Hawaii, Manoa 'Sharwood Smith and Truscott present their long-awaited book-length treatment of the MOGUL framework, an approach to linguistic - and in particular bilingual and multilingual - development which reconciles approaches from various contemporary linguistic, psycholinguistic and cognitive domains. The result is thorough, convincing and highly readable and will, no doubt, leave its mark on research into language development for many years to come.' Monika S. Schmid, University of Essex and University of Groningen 'The book offers an extensive description of the MOGUL (Modular On-line Growth and Use of Language) framework. The proposal is interesting, parsimonious, and elegant. The book is easy to follow, clearly written, and well organised (notably, each chapter opens with a chapter outline and concludes with a useful chapter summary), and the exposition is coherent.' Marta De Pedis, LINGUIST List