Fred Genesee is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

. He specializes in

second language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...

and bilingualism research. In particular, his research examines the early stages of the acquisition of two languages in order to better understand this form of

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

and ascertain the neurocognitive limits of the child's ability to acquire language. Specific topics Genesee has investigated in his research include language representation (

lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lexica ...

and

syntactic In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...

) in early stages of bilingual acquisition,

transfer Transfer may refer to: Arts and media * ''Transfer'' (2010 film), a German science-fiction movie directed by Damir Lukacevic and starring Zana Marjanović * ''Transfer'' (1966 film), a short film * ''Transfer'' (journal), in management studies ...

in bilingual development, structural and functional characteristics of child bilingual

code-mixing Code-mixing is the mixing of two or more languages or language varieties in speech. Some scholars use the terms "code-mixing" and "code-switching" interchangeably, especially in studies of syntax, morphology, and other formal aspects of lang ...

, and communication skills in young bilingual children. In addition to this, Genesee has investigated in second language acquisition in school and the modalities for effective acquisition in school contexts.

Publications

* Paradis, J. and F. Genesee (1996). ''Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent?'' ''SSLA'', 18, 1-25.

References

External links

Fred Genesee's Homepage
* ttp://www.carla.umn.edu/conferences/past/immersion/genesee.html CARLA 2004 Immersion Conference--Fred Genesee, Keynote Speaker Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian psychologists Academic staff of McGill University Bilingualism and second-language acquisition researchers {{Canada-linguist-stub