New Empirically Based Perspectives on Multilingualism

Multilingualism is one of the central themes in current linguistic and psycholinguistic debates. Additionally, multilingualism is a relevant topic in educational discussions and language policies across the world, even in the context of less studied languages such as Czech. This book highlights the multiple facets of multilingualism by presenting a number of original studies and reviews exploring this topic from a wide range of perspectives, including empirical, pedagogical, and language-teaching studies. The methodological approaches reach from linguistic descriptions and qualitative surveys to experimental methods used in infant research.

The book shows that individual multilingualism is a decisive factor for language processing, language acquisition and learning as well as language pedagogy. The book provides novel insights both for the discourse on multilingualism in general, and the Czech language specifically, inside and outside of the Czech Republic.

Barbara Mertins is Full Professor of Psycholinguistics at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. She also serves as the head of the psycholinguistics laboratories at the university. Her main research topics include language processing of multilingualism, linguistic relativity and spatial cognition.

Kateřina Šormová is a postdoc researcher in applied linguistics at the Charles University, Prague. Her work focuses on first- and second-language acquisition, language assessment, and the development of reading and writing literacy with particular interests in learner corpora and vocabulary acquisition.