Dr. Li Chuchu, who is currently a postdoc research fellow from University of California San Diego (UCSD), was invited to give a talk in the Center for Modern Language Studies at School of Foreign Studies, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics on April 20th from 6pm to 8pm in Room 426, Red Tile Building. She delivered a lecture entitled “Does Coffee Facilitate Language Switching?”.
Dr. Li talked about whether (non)cognates influence bilingual language switching by reporting results from two of her recent projects on Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Through picture naming tasks and paragraph reading tasks, Dr. Li and colleagues found that i) phonology plays a role in language control: cross-language overlap in phonology appears to influence language selection at both the phonological and lexical levels; ii) the effect of cross-language phonological overlap on language switching may be different (facilitation or inhibition), depending on the level or linguistic contexts.
After the talk, all faculty and graduate students present were involved in an active interaction for more inquiries. Dr. Li’s entertaining talk offers a great opportunity for us to learn more about bilingual language production.
(From Dr. Sheng Yanan)