This is an invitation to the meetings of LARC (Language Acquisition Resource Center) where we are now organizing to resume sessions after Covid complications last year.

The Center focuses on language acquisition of first, second, bilingual, heritage, multilingual, dialect and indigenous languages, besides language revitalization and language disorders.  No specific theoretical background in linguistic theory or acquisition theory is required or expected to participate at the meetings.  Our meetings have always been full of lively discussions and discussion of broader topics is encouraged.  It is an excellent way to get a sense of what is going on in acquisition in any of these areas.
 

Our group has generally met in the linguistics department with graduate students, and Interested undergraduates, visitors and faculty members from Linguistics, Spanish, Communication Disorders and the 5-college community. However, anyone who shares these interests is very welcome.  We encourage especially presentations about planned experiments so that people—especially students–can benefit from group brainstorming.

Our last meetings last Fall were online and internationally organized with contributors from not only the 5-colleges, but also Canada, Germany and Brazil and attendees from England, Holland, Romania and elsewhere.    While online connections are welcome (and often important) sources of discussion, we want to return essentially to the in-person format.

We would like to begin with a return to a more local focus and an emphasis on some basics of modern research challenges:  How experimental scenarios are developed and extensions into online experimentation, online questionnaires, and how to search various corpora (Childes, Wang Browser, etc.).   In addition, new adult populations, fieldwork environments, and the ever-changing social challenges linked to languages inevitably become involved.   First meeting:

Sept 16 Friday at 11:30 Room 451, ILC (UMass)

We will discuss plans and schedule individual proposals, and begin with  a first presentation on acquisition of recursion in Chinese by Bing Bai from Seechow University who has been a visitor to LARC over the past year.  He will present his experimentation in Mandarin Chinese on relative clauses and possessives (in L1 and L2) titled:

       Bing Bai:  The trigger information in recursive DPs

We would be glad to hear from any of you if you have questions or suggestions.