Preface
Acknowledgement
Chapter 1: Five basic points about bilingualism
Chapter 2: Multicompetent bilinguals
Chapter 3: Beware of different forms of the Monolingual Bias
Chapter 4: What is a critical period?
Chapter 5: Child Bilingualism: Exposure, but not only exposure, modifies proficiency
Chapter 6: Adult bilingualism: Language use, and many other predictor variables, modify proficiency
Chapter 7: Bilingual attrition: A waterfall in a river
Chapter 8: The Bilingual Brain: Bilinguals have a task that monolinguals do not have because bilinguals manage two or more languages in their brain
Chapter 9: Code-switching: “Back and forths” between languages is a sign of proficiency, not inadequacy
Chapter 10: Each bilingual experience is unique
Biography
Esther de Leeuw grew up on the West Coast of Canada, partly on Vancouver Island, partly on Haida Gwaii and partly in Terrace, BC. She studied phonetics, psychology and German in Trier, Germany and completed her PhD in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She started working at the BBC Pronunciation Unit directly after finishing her PhD and then continued her academic career at Queen Margaret University, London, where she founded and directed the QMUL Phonetics Laboratory from 2012 to 2023. She also co-founded Multilingual Capital at QMUL, an organisation that promoted the dissemination of academic research into multilingualism. In 2023, she moved with her husband and two daughters to Lausanne, Switzerland, to take up a professorship in Language Acquisition and Multilingualism, where she founded the organisation Multilingual Switzerland.
