Penn State’s Center for Language Science, and its director, noted for excellence.
The Penn State Center for Language Science (CLS), directed by Dr. Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Women’s Studies, was featured in an article that appeared in Education Week. The article highlighted the contribution of the CLS to the scientific understanding of how humans acquire language, particularly a second language, and how individuals who become bilingual negotiate life with two languages. Research conducted at the CLS has found that individuals who use two languages become, as Dr. Kroll says “mental jugglers who become adept in other types of cognitive skills”. Their research has also determined that the time frame to learn additional languages is not nearly as narrow as originally thought. “It has been long believed that the capacity to learn a new language diminishes substantially after the age of 7, and largely disappears after puberty. However, our work suggests a much more flexible time horizon”.
On the 125th anniversary of the journal Science, Kennedy and Norman (2005) identified the biological basis of second language learning as one of the top 125 questions to be answered in the next 25 years of research. The CLS is poised to make many more contributions to this area of inquiry. Indeed, Dr. Kroll, together with co-PIs Giuli Dussias, in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Ping Li, in the Department of Psychology, and Janet van Hell, in the Department of Psychology and Program in Linguistics, are leading a new five-year, $2.8 million grant project funded by the National Science Foundation that is bringing together scholars across the language sciences in different places in the world to compare the brain and mental processes of different types of bilinguals.
Researchers from the CLS and their international partners recently participated in a a symposium on bilingualism at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The theme of the 2011 AAAS conference, “Science without Borders”, captured the spirit of international research collaborations within the CLS.