Dr. Suzanne Carroll

Time in language acquisition research

Notions of time are central to language acquisition research because they deal with change (changes in behaviour, changes in knowledge systems, changes in processing capacities, etc.) that can only be assessed along a time-line. Time is also central to theoretical claims about the nature of language learning, for example, that second language learning is “slow and incremental”. In her talk, Dr. Carroll will pick apart such claims by defining different notions of time (often aligned with research methodologies). One goal is to differentiate the time it takes to “learn” a linguistic phenomenon, the time it takes to “master” it, and the time it takes to be “exposed” to relevant input. A second goal is to show that the slow/incremental claim confounds exposure-time with learning-time or mastery-time with learning-time. The arguments will be buttressed with data from a variety of experimental sources (including some from Dr. Carroll’s work).