The GRAM Research Group at the UIC Barcelona Institute for Multilingualism held the 11th edition of the Spring Research Conference on Multilingual Acquisition on 24 April. The conference focused on the study of bilingualism and multilingualism from a range of methodological perspectives. The event, which was attended both in person at the Barcelona Campus and online, brought together close to fifty researchers and specialists from around the world.

The conference was opened by Dr Noelia Navarro, director of the Department of Applied Linguistics, and Dr Román Pérez, vice-rector for Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer at UIC Barcelona. Both speakers highlighted the importance of fostering spaces for academic exchange in the field of linguistic research.

This year’s keynote sessions were delivered by Dr Núria Sebastian-Gallés, lecturer in Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University, and Dr Ruth Kircher, researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). Together, the two keynote addresses offered complementary perspectives on language learning processes and language use in multilingual contexts.

In her keynote, entitled “Learning two lexicons: foes and friends”, Dr Sebastian-Gallés examined early language development in infants, explaining how bilingual children develop specific adaptive mechanisms to manage more than one language from the earliest stages of life.

Dr Kircher delivered the keynote “Raising children with more than one language: the dimensionality, nature and consequences of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism”. Her presentation focused on the influence of family attitudes on children’s multilingual development and drew on findings from a range of international studies to illustrate how parental perceptions shape language transmission and language use within the family environment.

The conference programme also included parallel paper presentation sessions and an interactive poster session. Research topics covered language acquisition, sociolinguistics, multilingual practices in digital environments, CLIL education and the impact of digital tools and artificial intelligence on language learning.

After eleven editions, the Spring Research Conference continues to strengthen its position as a key forum for academic debate and international collaboration in the fields of bilingualism and multilingualism.