Spanish Language Acquisition in Children: A Transnational Research Collaboration
Children have the right to use their own language (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). Yet, most of what we know about language development is based on monolingual English-learning children. We will expand UCLA’s global research impact by building a partnership with UNAM, Latin America’s largest university, to investigate Spanish language acquisition. Despite being the second most spoken language worldwide (and in the U.S.), we know little about how children learn Spanish. Likewise, although there are more bilinguals in the world than monolinguals, bilingual development remains poorly understood. Through this collaboration, we will address critical gaps in how monolingual and bilingual children learn Spanish.