The keynote speaker of FPM 2023 will be Dr. Debra Titone of McGill University. Please see information below regarding her talk.
Socioecology, Language, & Neurocognition: A Systems View of Multilingualism
Debra Titone, Department of Psychology, Montreal Bilingualism Initiative (MoBI), Centre for Research on Brain, Language, & Music (CRBLM), McGill University
A vast number of people communicate using more than one language in daily life, leading to a globally emergent multilingualism. Global multilingualism is driven by a variety of historic and current social constraints operative on people and communities. This has led some to theorize that multilingual use possesses the hallmarks of a complex cognitive system (e.g., Atkinson et al., 2016; de Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor, 2007; Titone & Tiv, 2022; Tiv et al., 2022), which is amenable to a socioecological perspective. In this presentation, I review recent work from my laboratory that characterizes the content of what multilingual people communicate about using different languages, and how the languages people use across their social networks relate to first vs. second language proficiency, language attitudes, and comprehension generally. In doing so, I present a new framework – the Systems View of Bilingualism – to encourage a more nuanced, inclusive, and socially informed understanding of multilingual experience that bridges individual, interpersonal, and socioecological levels.