Polyglot Lab

The Polyglot Lab is housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We are located in Herter Hall 404, where we usually run second language acquisition experiments and have research meetings, including the ones of our SLA discussion group (SLAers). Check our research page to learn about our projects. The lab also supports the Polyglot Club, a group of UMass students who love to speak multiple languages, and who regularly organize meetings to explore ways of improving their language learning journey. The Polyglot Lab is affiliated with the UMass Language Acquisition Research Center.

Our mission

Research has shown the many social, personal and cognitive benefits of bilingualism. We are a group of researchers and language learners who believe that everybody deserves the opportunity to speak more than one language. The Polyglot Lab's mission is to promote language learning and multilingualism by:

Studying how people of all ages acquire additional languages.
Researching strategies, tools, and pedagogical approaches that can facilitate language learning.
Hosting discussion groups, academic events and educational opportunities to promote multilingualism.
Organizing venues for speakers of minoritized languages to discuss and exchange ideas about language preservation and revitalization.

The world is polyglot!

Most people around the world live in multilingual environments. Some countries like Canada, Switzerland, South Africa and Paraguay are officially multilingual. Other countries like China, Mexico, Ghana, India and Iran have an incredible amount of languages spoken in their territories. Even in the US, where English is the socially dominant language (though not official), there are more than 300 languages spoken. The majority of people around the world either need to speak more than one language in their daily lives or have learned another language for social, professional, personal or educational reasons. Let's face it: The World is Polyglot!

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