Andrea Marini
The Bilingual Brain: an Introduction to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Bilingualism
Conferencista
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Andrea Marini
Andrea Marini
Andrea Marini is currently Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Udine (Italy) where he leads the Language Lab (section of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab of his Department) and teaches classes of Psychology of Language, Neurolinguistics, and Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. He earned his bachelor’s degree maxima cum laude in Linguistics in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Neuropsychology in 2002 at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, Italy. Prof. Marini is among the founders of the Degree in Speech Therapy at the Universities of Udine and Trieste and member of the PhD School in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Trieste. Prof. Marini was Visiting Professor at the East Carolina University (USA) and Italian member of the EU COST Action (Programme Horizon 2020): IS1406, Enhancing children’s oral language skills across Europe and beyond. Since 2006 he has been Principal Investigator or Research Unit Coordinator in a number of Research Projects funded by the Italian National Health System. He is editorial director of the book series “Neuroscienze, Psicologia, Educazione” at Carocci publisher in Rome and invited speaker in over 200 domestic and international conferences. Prof. Marini has authored 120 publications (books, diagnostic tools, book chapters and scientific articles in peer-reviewed international journals).
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Andrea Marini
The Bilingual Brain: an Introduction to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Bilingualism
The vast majority of the world’s population speaks at least two languages on a daily basis. This highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of the cognitive, linguistic, and neurological characteristics of bilingualism. The talk is ideally divided in three sections. The first part will focus on the introduction to the notion of bilingual competence and will consider both linguistic and teaching issues related to this condition (both assessing the potential side effects of bilingualism on linguistic structures and considering the influence of social contact and interactions on the process of linguistic acquisition in bilinguals). The second part of the lecture will consider the cognitive issues related to bilingualism. Namely, the existence of a bilingual advantage in cognitive control will be discussed presenting the results of experiments that focused on auditory attention, the ability to learn from mixed inputs and generalize rules, cognitive flexibility, and working memory in infants, children, teenagers, and adults. The third section of the talk will deal with the neuropsychological characteristics (e.g., discussing its impact on linguistic development in children with Developmental Language Disorders and adult aphasic patients) and neural underpinnings of bilingual competence (considering the results from neuroimaging experiments).