John Culatto
A SPANISH university is inviting people from Gibraltar to help them study how bilingual brains work and give a lecture on their research.
Academics from the University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab (UVAVAL) will be carrying out their second visit to Gibraltar.
They will be focusing on the combined use of Englsh or Spanish in the community.
Academics are calling out for people over the age of 18 who can give their time from January 23-27.
Volunteers need to have been born on the Rock or have lived there since the age of eight.
Academics have created eye tracking sessions involving silent reading and picture-sentence matching tasks.
“The UVALAL makes use of linguistic theory, as well as spontaneous and experimental data, to account for different linguistic phenomena that are related to language contact situations,” the Gibraltar Government, that is backing the project, said in a statement.
As part of the visit academic Raquel Fernandez Fuertes from Valladolid University will give a lecture.
It will be called ‘Bilingualism from the outside and from the inside’.
UVALAL will hold the lecture at the Charles Hunt Room, John Mackintosh Hall, on January 23 at 6.30pm.
Although it is free to attend, tickets need to be booked online at buytickets.gi.
Gibraltar is unique in Europe as a place where residents speak both English and Spanish in their everyday life.
However, when the frontier closed in 1969 many of the roots with Spain were broken.
Many parents started to turn away from Spanish and latest figures suggest about 50% of children nowadays only speak English.
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