Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Linguistics research has traditionally been shaped by the idea of a native monolingual speaker. Research on bilingualism and language learning has also defined stages and features of bilinguals in terms of differences (‘advantages’ or ‘disadvantages’) with respect to native monolingual norms.  Is this still appropriate? I will show how interdisciplinary research that combines the strengths of linguistic, cognitive and social models is deconstructing the notion of the ‘monolingual speaker’ as a default. This, in turn, opens new ways to do research on bilingualism and, more generally, on language.