Scholarships at Bangor University
Grammatical categories and cognition in Welsh-English bilinguals (08)
Award
PhD Research Bursary
Supervisors/Schools:
Dr Panos Athanasopoulos (School of Linguistics)
Professor Guillaume Thierry (School of Psychology)
Professor Vyvyan Evans (School of Linguistics)
Dr. Dirk Bury (School of Linguistics)
Description of Project:
The project aims to uncover bilinguals’ mental representations of the world when the two languages partition reality in different ways. For example, Welsh marks gender on nouns whereas English does not. Welsh and English also differ in the ways they implement grammatical number marking on nouns. At the lexical domain, the Welsh term glas is the translation equivalent of blue, yet it is also used to describe a large portion of the green area of colour spectrum. The PhD candidate will use a range of linguistic, behavioural and neurophysiological experimental techniques to investigate the extent to which Welsh-English bilinguals perceive objects in the real world differently from English monolinguals, as a result of cross-linguistic differences in grammar and lexicon between Welsh and English. The project will also investigate whether bilinguals think differently when using their different languages. This kind of cross-disciplinary approach will elucidate the precise nature of conceptual organisation in the multilingual mind.
Supervisory Team
Dr Panos Athanasopoulos. Dr Athanasopoulos’ expertise is in the area
of bilingual cognition. He has looked at grammatical number marking
and categorization in Japanese-English bilinguals, and at colour categorization
in Greek-English and Welsh-English bilinguals. He is currently supervising
a PhD on grammatical gender and object perception in English-French
bilinguals.
Professor Guillaume Thierry. This project is interdisciplinary in nature
and involves methodology from the field of cognitive neuroscience. Professor
Thierry is a leading expert in the cognitive neuroscience of bilingualism,
reflected in his high impact publications on the topic and in his role
as Head of the Neuroscience group in the ESRC Centre for Research on
Bilingualism.
Professor Vyvyan Evans. Professor Evans is an internationally profiled
expert in the area of Cognitive Linguistics.
Dr Dirk Bury. Dr Bury will provide his expertise on the grammar of the
Welsh language, particularly with regards to grammatical categories
like gender and number in Welsh, which will be part of the focus of
this project. He has also worked on aspects of Welsh word order and
is currently supervising a PhD dissertation on the effects of language
contact on the structure of spoken Welsh.
For full details of the terms and conditions of this award see.
Queries prior to a formal application concerning this research project
should be addressed to:
Dr Panos Athanasopoulos (School of Linguistics): panos@bangor.ac.uk
Application:
The application deadline is noon on Friday 30 April 2010. For more information on how to apply, please visit here
Applicants will be contacted during the month of June 2010 with information relating to their submissions.
