Institute Sponsors Intensive Course on Bilingualism at YALP 2026 in Yerevan

For the past four years, the Institute has sponsored Dr. Maria Polinsky from the University of Maryland to teach a week-long intensive course on the linguistics of bilingualism at the Yerevan Academy for Linguistics and Philosophy (YALP), held June 29 to July 10, 2026 at the American University of Armenia. Her course anchored the second week of the program, which each year brings together more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students from Armenia, Russia, Iran, and the wider region for tuition-free training in linguistics and philosophy. 

Across five lectures, the course offered a tour of what bilingual speakers can teach us about the architecture of human language — from the sounds they produce to the sentences they judge. 

The opening lecture laid out the conceptual foundations of the field: balanced and unbalanced bilingualism, language dominance and its reversal over time, the notion of the baseline, and the much-debated question of a “bilingual advantage.” Rather than treating that advantage as a fixed trait, the course reframed it in terms of dual language activation — a mode of processing that supports attention, inference, and deeper conceptual representation regardless of which language is dominant.

Days two and three turned to bilingual phonetics and phonology, in production and comprehension. Case studies ranged from voice onset time in Spanish and Korean stops to tone production in Mandarin and vowel systems in Toronto Cantonese — and, fittingly for the Yerevan audience, the vowels of Heritage Western Armenian, which turns out not to be reducible to simple transfer from English. On the perception side, the course reviewed striking findings that bilingual speakers in some cases even outperform monolinguals in sound discrimination.

The fourth lecture,  titled “What you don’t know can hurt you: how a language you barely speak affects the one you do,” took up the issues of semantics, namely, quantifier scope. The final lecture demonstrated how code-switching can serve as a precision instrument for syntactic theory.

A distinctive feature of the course was that its methods and findings were consistently presented as tools students could take up and apply to Armenian and to the many situations of Armenian bilingualism — in Armenia itself, where Armenian coexists with Russian and English, and across the global diaspora, where Eastern and Western Armenian are maintained as heritage languages alongside dominant languages as varied as English, French, Russian, or Arabic.

The course doubled as a research incubator, handing the next generation of researchers in the region both the questions and the experimental toolkit — acceptability judgment tasks, acoustic measurement, corpus methods — needed to answer them with Armenian data. 

YALP, founded in 2017, is hosted by the American University of Armenia and supported by the AUA Center for Ethics in Public Affairs and USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies. Participation is free of charge, and the program aims to prepare students in the region for doctoral study in linguistics and philosophy in Europe and the United States. Maria Polinsky serves as an academic advisor to YALP, where she has taught a variety of courses, from the bilingualism course this year, to courses in formal syntax and language universals. 

Maria “Masha” Polinsky is Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, and stands as one of the world’s foremost authorities on heritage languages and the linguistic diversity of the Caucasus.