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The number of bilingual and multilingual speakers around the world is steadily growing, leading to the questions: How do bilinguals manage two or more language systems in their daily interactions, and how does being bilingual/multilingual affect brain functioning and vice versa? Previous research has shown that cognitive control plays a key role in bilingual language management. This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that foreign languages have been found to affect not only the expected linguistic domains, but surprisingly, other non-linguistic domains such as cognitive control, attention, inhibition, and working memory. Somehow, learning languages seems to affect executive/brain functioning. In the literature, this is referred to as the bilingual advantage, meaning that people who learn two or more languages seem to outperform monolinguals in executive functioning skills. In this Special Issue, we first present studies that investigate the bilingual advantage. We also go one step further, by focusing on factors that modulate the effect of bilingualism on cognitive control. In the second, smaller part of our Special Issue, we focus on the cognitive reserve hypothesis with the aim of addressing the following questions: Does the daily use of two or more languages protect the aging individual against cognitive decline? Does lifelong bilingualism protect against brain diseases, such as dementia, later in life?.

Bilingualism.

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This volume contains interdisciplinary essays on bilingual education in various countries of the world. Some contributions deal with policy and curricular issues with regard to minority and majority language, some consider the enrichment aspect of bilingual education. Others focus on language maintenance and revitalization, still others look at ways in which bilingual education could stabilize the functions of the societal languages. All contributions support bilingualism in society and consider how bilingual education could promote that goal. A special section is devoted to US policies and po

Bilingualism.

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This Special Issue features a collection of state-of-the art articles on the intonational patterns of different types of bilinguals (e.g., second language learners; heritage speakers; simultaneous bilinguals), with a particular focus on understudied language pairings and encompassing a wide variety of languages (e.g. Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, German, English, French, Inuktitut, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Spanish). The papers in this Special Issue address a number of questions that have so far remained unanswered: Can we determine a hierarchy of difficulty or transferability? How does prosody interact with other components of the grammar, such as morphology or syntax, in a contact situation? Which aspects are more prone to bidirectional interference? Which changes in intonation make speakers sound foreign in their second (or first) language? The papers in this Special Issue offer answers to these questions and open up multiple avenues for future research. We hope that this Special Issue will inspire future studies on intonation and bilingualism.

Bilingualism. --- Multilingualism.

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Das Bedürfnis, sich mitzuteilen, ist ein Motor zwischenmenschlicher Interaktion. Wie die in der Interaktion aktivierten Mechanismen und Prozesse auf den Spracherwerb wirken, wird in der Spracherwerbsforschung seit langem aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven untersucht. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes versuchen die Frage nach dem erwerbsfördernden Potenzial von Interaktion für den Erst-, Zweit- und Fremdspracherwerb in unterschiedlichen Konstellationen und Lernsettings auszuloten und aus theoretischer, didaktischer und empirischer Perspektive zu beantworten.

Bilingualism. --- Multilingualism.

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The present book comprises a number of studies centered around the topic of how knowledge diffuses from one culture to another, and how knowledge diffusion is connected with the spread of languages and the conceptual systems they carry by translation. This diffusion also takes place also over linguistic borders, in the way that a given receiving language may also absorb systems of knowledge from languages that are linguistically quite unrelated but culturally connected with respect to knowledge transfer. Thus we find that Sumerian concepts with considerable impact were moved into the Akkadian language, along with writing-systems, religion, science and literature, even though linguistically the languages are completely unrelated. Another example is how Chinese culture and writing systems spread throughout East Asia into Korea, Japan and Vietnam, though the languages of these countries were linguistically unrelated to Chinese. The same case can be made for Buddhist ways of thinking when it was clothed in the garb of Chinese or Tibetan, or one of the other languages along the Silk Road. This is also true for the spread of Manicheism, as it was portrayed in a great number of languages, related or unrelated. German and Latin are linguistically related, but when Latin learning was communicated in Old High German, many of its terms were created in Middle German to accommodate the Latin conceptual world, and the German language was lastingly enriched with novisms denoting concepts of the Classical traditions of learning, in a process parallel to the spread of Greek Christianity into the East European cultures and languages. The book describes some cases of such knowledge transfer and what kind of mechanisms are involved in the ensuing language changes in the receiving languages and cultures.

Language --- Bilingualism & multilingualism