2025 Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Note: This event is RSVP only

Please join us in honoring the 2025 UCLA Spanish & Portuguese Distinguished Alumni Lecture Award recipient Dr. Jason Rothman, Professor at Lancaster University, U.K..

The 2025 Distinguished Alumni Lecture topic is “Behavioral and Brain Evidence for the Systematicity of Individual Differences in Heritage Language Bilingualism.” Heritage Language (HL) bilinguals—native learners of a language spoken at home that is not the shared, common language of the larger society in which they grow up—acquire their HLs naturalistically in early childhood. Despite HL bilinguals being native speakers, studies over the past three decades typically document significant differences to L1-dominant homeland users as well as high degrees of variation at the individual heritage bilingual speaker level. While individual differences are also present across L1-dominant users of language—e.g. not all native speakers of American English speak the same way—the spectrum of individual differences in HL bilinguals is significantly wider. Although Individual differences are governed by a unique set of dynamic variables we do not yet fully understand, shifting focus to understanding individual differences better has great theoretical and practical value. The present talk revolves around two central points falling out from investigating the systematicity behind individual differences: (i) the determinism of various internal and external factors—as well as their interactions—contributing to the acquisition and processing of HLs specifically is not random and, as such, is crucial for understanding language in the mind more generally and (ii) related research significantly questions the utility, if not appropriateness, of using so-called monolingual comparisons as a default baseline for bilingual research. With the above in mind, the present talk, offers an introductory landscape of HL
studies that endeavors to contextualize, investigate and capitalize on the theoretical value of understanding individual differences. In doing so, I will refer to current research from my lab with several language pairings, across various age ranges and geographical areas. Given the context of this talk, I will especially highlight behavioral (acquisition) and brain (processing) data on grammatical gender in Spanish as a HL in the US. As we might expect, there is no one-size-fits-all (set of) variable(s) that is explanatory for everything in all HL contexts. Rather, as we should
expect, the (weighting and/or interaction of) variables that regress to cover individual differences depend on what (the domain of language), who (the profiles of HL bilinguals) and where (e.g., important differences of location that delimit exposure/usage) we are investigating. This ensuing discussion sheds light on multiple levels of trending differences: between so-called monolinguals to HL bilinguals, between distinct populations of HL bilinguals, e.g., European to North American to Asian contexts, and intra-group differences across individual HL bilinguals traditionally studied as a single aggregate. 

The UCLA Spanish & Portuguese Department will host the Distinguished Alumni lecture on Monday, February 3, 2025 at 4:00 PM at the UCLA Faculty Club. The lecture will be held in the Hacienda Room. RSVP Only.