INSPIRE - Investigating Speech Processing in Realistic Environments

We would like to warmly invite you to join our Radboud Summer School course on "Multilingualism in the Wild"

Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands http://www.ru.nl/radboudsummerschool/

Dates: 10-14 August 2015

Topic:

Successful communication is a key factor for social and cultural integration. At the same time, increasing numbers of people travel, live, or work in a non-native language environment, and thus speak multiple languages that are not their mother tongue. The processing of these non-native languages is a complex cognitive task; speaking and listening to a non-native speaker asks for both socio-cultural as for language-specific strategies. This difficult multilingual multitasking in a person’s head is especially noticeable when listening to (or as) a non-native speaker in the presence of background noise like in a pub.

In this course we focus on the effects of multilingualism in the real world, ‘in the wild’. What effect does non-nativeness have on comprehensibility, status and image and media choice? But also, for example, on safety in a multilingual working team in an international organisation. Would it not be helpful if we all could learn to use new languages in a native way?

And how can a new language best be learned; in a classroom with a grammar book or better on the street in the country and the culture the language belongs to? Is there a difference between learning your mother tongue and learning a second language? Is it possible to reach the “perfect” native level in a second language? Does learning to speak and listen in a new language really mean that you have learned to think or literally look at the world around you in a different way?

Course leaders:

dr. Marianne Starren, associate professor dr. Odette Scharenborg, associate professor

More information:

http://www.ru.nl/radboudsummerschool/courses/history-langa-comm/@969952/multilingualism-the/

Registration closes at the end of June.

Apply now:

http://fmfe01.hosting.ru.nl/fmi/iwp/cgi?-db=WebAanmeldingRSS&-loadframes