Bilingualism 

Bilingualism represents an interesting challenge from the perspective of pattern learning. Whereas monolinguals must master the probabilistic relationships of a single language system, bilinguals must contend with learning two systems. Do learners (especially young learners) know that the patterns should not be combined? If they do separate the statistics of multiple languages, how do they come to assign probabilities to the right language? Do bilingual learners make different assumptions about their language input relative to monolinguals?  A related goal of this research is to understand more generally how learners contend with variability in the input.