About the project

 

Language is a crucial part of communication but can become more difficult to manage with age. For example, many people will recognise the feeling of knowing which word they want to say, but not being able to find it quickly or feeling as if it is on the “tip of their tongue”! Even though over half of the world speaks more than one language, we still know very little about how bilingual speech can change with age. Bilinguals have a vocabulary of words in both of their languages, and when speaking either language, these words might all be active at the same time and compete with each other to be selected. This means that when wanting to produce a word in a specific language, bilinguals need to constantly manage the competition from the other language(s). Bilinguals also often need to switch languages, sometimes in response to the people they are talking with (for example, when speaking with an English monolingual person). Switching can happen for other reasons too, for example because a bilingual can find a word faster in another language or they prefer to express an idea in another language, where this idea might be better understood culturally. To successfully produce words in one or multiple languages, and switch at the right time, bilinguals use the so-called “language control” processes.

This project, called MultiAge, aims to understand how bi-/multilingual people use and control their languages across the lifespan. MultiAge is a five-year project, containing multiple studies. Some of these studies are longitudinal, meaning that we are asking people to participate multiple times to see how language use and control change with time. MultiAge is led by Dr. Angela de Bruin, from the University of York, and supported by Dr. Zlati Ilchovska (Postdoctoral Associate) and Dr. Farah Nazir (Research Project Manager).

Importantly, MultiAge is exploring bi-/multilingualism through the perspective of minority language speakers in the UK, and particularly younger and older adults speaking Pahari-Pothwari/Mirpuri/Panjabi (for brevity called here Pahari-Pothwari). This way, the project hopes to bring in-depth insight into the ways these bi-/multilingual speakers use and control their languages in different types of communicative contexts, throughout the lifespan.

Multiage is funded by the UKRI as part of the Horizon Europe guarantee scheme for selected ERC grants (Grant number: EP/Y036522/1).