Learning a New Language by Utilizing Your First Language: Hawai'i as a Case Study

In this talk, Mitchi (Michelle) Kamigaki-Baron will discuss what linguistics research has to say about learning a new language. Surprisingly, the various ways languages are related can make speech processing easier, whether the languages are related socially, contextually or linguistically. Using her own research in the Hawaiian context, she will also describe the various applications of such findings, including how we can learn languages spoken by our parents or grandparents, and ways we can institutionalize support of the revitalization of Indigenous languages. She will also present ways that we can leverage knowledge from languages we already speak when learning a new language.

Mitchi (Michelle) Kamigaki-Baron is a PhD Candidate in the Linguistics Department at UBC. Her research involves understanding how multilingual speakers systematically store and access language sounds, and how linguistic sound categories are built by learners of a second language. She is involved primarily in two languages spoken in her home community: Pidgin, ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, and in a First Nations language spoken in British Columbia: Secwepemctsín.