Fall 1999 - Spring 2000

Close Encounters Across Cultures: A Film Series

Presented by: Center for Billingual/Bicultural Studies (CB/BS), International Student Association, and International Film Club.

October 21, 1999 - Song of Exile
October 28, 1999 - Lone Star
November 4, 1999 - Kolya
November 18,1999 - Clando

Time: 7:00 PM
Location: 4-237

Voix et visages du multiculturalisme en France: d'hier a aujourd'hui

A joint event with MIT's Foreign Languages & Literatures department and the French Consulate

7:00-8:30pm: Un sang d'encre (Black as ink)

Directed by Jacques Goldstein and Blaise N'Djehoya

Tells the story of the migration to France of Afro-American artists and intellectuals after the Second World War (in French with English subtitles).

8:30-10:00pm: Black, Blanc, Beur: parlons-en!

Directed by Johann Sadock

What is it like to live in France when your heritage is African, Arabic, Jewish or Asian? (in French, no subtitles)

Each film will be followed by a discussion with the directors, led by Odile Cazenave, Visiting Associate Professor.

Date: November 16, 1999
Location: 4-237

Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition: The Bilingual Brain

Theme : The Bilingual* Brain (i.e: * = Multilingual)

Friday, March 31, 2000

9:00-9:30: Introductory Remarks
9:30-10:30: Plenary Speaker: Loraine Obler, Graduate Center
10:30-10:40: Break
10:40-11:00: "The Monolingual Nature of Phonological Processing in Bilinguals" Sharon Peperkamp, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Nuria Sebatián-Gallés (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS-CNRS)
11:00-11:20: "It’s Just as Good the Second time ‘Round: Native-Like Ultimate Attainment in L2 Phonology" Jeffrey Steele (McGill University)
11:20-11:40:"Syntactic Behaviours of Thematic Verbs in German-, French-, and English-Speakers’ L2 Chinese: Against the Inevitability of Thematic-Verb Raising in L2 Acquisition" Boping Yuan (University of Cambridge)
11:40-12:00: Break
12:00-12:20:" Autoknow and Sugh: A Reply to Newmeyer" Laurent Dekytspotter and Rex A. Sprouse (Indiana University)
12:20-12:40: "Converging Evidence for a Syntactic-Theoretical Constraint in Bilingual Speech" Gretchen Sunderman and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (Pennsylvania State University)
12:40-2:00: Lunch
2:00-3:00: Plenary Speaker Karl Kim (Cornell Medical)
3:00-3:20: "Teasing Apart Truncation and Missing Inflection in Initial Child L2 Grammars" Philippe Prévost (Laval University)
3:20-3:40: "On the Second Language Acquisition of Crosslinguistic Variation in Different Domains of the Functional Module" Manijeh Youhanaee (Isfahan University)
3:40-4:00: "Root Infinitives and Non-nominative Subjects in the Bilingual First Language Acquisition of Japanese and English" Usha Lakshmanan and Yuko Ito (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale)

Saturday, April 1, 2000

9:00-9:30: Coffee
9:30-10:30: Plenary Speaker: Janet Werker (University of British Columbia)
10:30-10:40: Break
10:40-11:00 : "Abstract Features in L2 Grammars: Evidence from Interpretation of Null Nominals" Lydia White, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna MacGregor, Ingrid Leung, and Hela Ben Ayed (Mc Gill University)
11:00-11:20: "Early and Late Bilinguals and the Acquisition of Dative Clitic Doubling" Joyce Bruhn de Garavito (University of Western Ontario)
11:20-11:40: "Interface Constraints in Romance SLA" Larry Lafond (university of South Carolina), Rachel Hayes (University of Arizona) and Rakesh Bhatt (University of South Carolina)
11:40-12:00: Break
12:00-12:20: "The Lexical Learning Hypothesis, Attainment, and Explanation in SLA: The Case of Tough Sentences" Helmut Zobl (Carleton University)
12:20-12:40: "On the Mental Representation of Spanish N-N Compounds" J.M. Liceras, T. Salomaa-Robertson, C. Mongeon, A. Lázaro, and S. Varo (University of Ottawa)
12:40-2:00: Lunch
2:00-3:00: Plenary Speaker: Howard Nussbaum (University of Chicago)
3:00-3:20: "More on the Source of Defective L2 Past Tense Morphology" Roger Hawkins and Sarah Liska (University of Essex)
3:20-3:40: "On Optionality and Grammaticality in L2 Knowledge" Donna Lardiere (Georgetown University)
3:40-4:40: Tentative Plenary Speaker
4:40-5:40: Business Meeting

Sunday, April 2, 2000

9:00-9:30: Coffee
9:30-10:30: Plenary Speaker: Jennifer Austin (Williams College)
10:30-10:40: Break
10:40-11:00: "Multiple Acquisition Paths, Alternative Numerations: A Minimalist View of the Second Language Acquisition of Possession in Spanish" Ana Pérez-Leroux (University of Toronto)
11:00-11:20: "Why Do Learners Occur Such Errors and How Are They Occurred? Novel Passives and Novel Causitives in Interlanguage English" Patricia A. Balcom (University of Moncton)
11:20-11:40: "Interpretation of Reflexive binsing and the Internal Subject Hypothesis by Chinese-Speaking Learners of English: A Timed Sentence Judgment Task" Ian H.G. Ying (University of Colorado-Denver)
11:40-12:00: "Acquisition of Aspectual Information by Kazakh-Russian Children" Inna Vinnitskaya (MIT)
12:00-12:20: "Non-Direct Object Agreement in Bilingual Andean Spanish" Sue Kalt (USC and MIT)
12:20-12:40: Closing Remarks: TBA

Date: March 31 - April 2, 2000
Location: University Park Hotel, MIT

Sponsored by: The Center for Bilingual and Bicultural Studies (CBBS), Foreign Languages & Literatures, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Language For Seven Generations

The conference is designed to assist area tribes in the field of language reclamation. Issues such as project planning, resource gathering, community organizing, teaching tools, training, and linguistic structure of area languages will be explored.

Saturday, June 10, 2000

7:00-10:00AM: Registration Check-In & Continental Breakfast
10:00-10:30AM: Welcome and Opening Remarks

Tobias Vanderhoop, Aquinnah Wampanoag, Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project Co-Chair
Jessie Little Doe, Mashpee Wampanoag, Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project Co-Chair
Professor Kenneth Hale, MIT
10:30-11:00AM: Project Planning and Community Organizing

Tobias Vanderhoop, Aquinnah Wampanoag, Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project Co-Chair
11:00AM-12:00PM: Resource Gathering, Evaluation, and Language Correspondence

Benjamin Bruening, MIT
12:00-2:00PM: Lunch (Individually Responsible)
2:00-3:00PM: Curriculum Development Tools

Robert Levitt
3:00-4:00PM: Effective Approach to Project Research and Material Development

Jessie Little Doe, MIT
4:00-6:00PM: Break
6:00-9:00PM: Traditional Social and Buffet Dinner

Host Drum, Mystic River (Regalia Please)

Sunday, June 11, 2000

8:00-10:00AM: Registration Check-In & Continental Breakfast
10:00-11:00AM: Where the Journey Takes Us

Comments, Stories and Poetry from the Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project Participants
11:00AM-12:00PM: Professor Phil Lesourd, Indiana University
12:00-2:00PM: Lunch (Individually Responsible)
2:00-3:00PM: Building a Lexicon
Professor Kenneth Hale, MIT
3:00-4:00PM: "Compiling a Grammar: Some Case Studies from Wopanaak"
Professor Norvin Richards, MIT
4:00-4:30PM: Creating a Venue for Your Language
Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project

4:30-5:00PM: Conference Participant Questions & Conference Closing

Sponsored by:
The Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies (CB/BS), Foreign Languages and Literatures, Linguistics, and Philosophy.