It’s been a busy and productive academic year, and in this issue you’ll also hear a bit about some of the outreach events we’ve been a part of. This spring, we were delighted to collaborate with Penn State’s Center for Global Studies and Global Connections on World Stories Alive, a weekly bilingual reading event for children held each Saturday at The Schlow Library. Look for the series again next spring, and please get in touch if you’d like to volunteer to share your native language at one of the events. We’ll also be out and about in the community this summer, with events at local schools as well as Children’s Day at the Central PA Arts Fest. We hope to see and talk with you at these events, and we look forward to many more interesting discussions about bilingualism and language learning!
Some things you’ll find in the Spring/Summer newsletter…
Have you ever traveled to a foreign country of a different mother tongue, and tried to understand important signs by trying to guess what the words mean? If so, you’ve probably noticed that while some words can look or sound different across languages, some words are fairly easy to guess! The theme of this Bilingualism Matters newsletter is cognates. Cognates are words that have similar form and meaning across languages (e.g., car in English and carro in Spanish). Just like a tourist may use cognates at a crossroads while abroad, language scientists use cognates to better understand how languages change over time and how languages are stored and represented in the brains and minds of bilingual speakers. In this issue of our newsletter, you’ll be able to learn more about research on cognates, and some of the interesting things they reveal about language and bilingualism.
In case you haven’t met us yet…
We are a group of community members and language scientists interested in sharing insights from research on bilingualism with the general public, and in helping people put those insights to practical use in their daily lives. Our Bilingualism Matters language scientists are affiliated with Penn State’s Center for Language Science (CLS), an interdisciplinary group of linguists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, speech-language pathologists, and cognitive neuroscientists who share an interest in language acquisition and bilingualism. Our committee also includes community representatives from local schools, and we hope to continue to involve more community members as our work evolves.
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