FIHELaD · Factors In Home and Environment Language Development

Intra-European migration has populated the school classrooms of mainstream education in Europe’s countries with multilingual students. In European primary schools, typical classrooms include bilingual children of Greek descent who speak Greek as their home language in Germany and bilingual children of German descent who speak Greek as their environment language in Greece. For these pupils being competent in both the home and environment language is pivotal for school achievement. Notwithstanding the large number of studies on the interplay of language systems in the human mind, the fundamental question of language development in multilingualism has yet to be addressed sufficiently: How do linguistic and extra-linguistic person-level factors predict the acquisitional outcome of both the home and the environment language in multilingual classroom populations? The proposed Factors In Home and Environment Language Development (FIHELaD) project addresses this question from an interdisciplinary approach bringing together multilingualism and developmental psycholinguistics along with didactics and data science. This project makes incremental progress towards the goal of advancing the scientific understanding regarding language acquisition and processing and feeding back into society those answers that inform citizens of the beneficial state-of-affairs of multilingualism. FIHELaD is a comprehensive project examining how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors shape the parsing routines of grammatical phenomena with complex syntactic structure, specifically focus sentences, in the home and environment language of 150-200 Greek-German bilingual children. To predict future language development trajectories via statistical modelling, FIHELaD triangulates a unique experimental methodology by combining gaze and pupillometry eye tracking data with classroom-based and baseline experimental observations.