The Marshall M. Weinberg Symposium is an annual interdisciplinary event that focuses on cognitive science and includes a philosophical commentary. The topic of the 2012 Symposium is Bilingualism. Most people in the world are bilingual or multilingual, but most research on language and the brain has historically investigated language processing, language learning, and language use in monolinguals. Increasingly, however, neurolinguists and psycholinguists are studying the organization of language in the bilingual brain, and sociolinguists are studying bilingual language use.

The purpose of this Symposium is to explore the implications of such research for theories of human cognition. The first five speakers are world-renowned specialists in bilingualism who will address the topic from a variety of perspectives: spoken-/signed-language bilingualism, code-switching and language mixing, cognitive development and bilingualism, preverbal infants and bilingualism, and first- vs. second-language bilingual acquisition in children. The sixth speaker is a philosopher who will pull together the strands of the five bilingualism talks by considering philosophical implications of the phenomenon of bilingualism.

This Symposium is free and open to the public. Participants may attend any or all of the event. This event is sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, with funding from an endowment for Philosophy and Cognitive Science.