Halimah Alalawi

Second language acquisition, Bilingualism, Sociolinguistics, Syntax

Halimah Alalawi is a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics program at George Mason University. Her research focuses on language acquisition and language processing in bilinguals. She studies how overlapping and non-overlapping features in bilingual languages influence each other in comprehension and production. She closely examines the use of morphological and morphosyntactic cues, as well as agreement features, to understand the extent of interaction between the two languages and the context in which it occurs.

In her research, Halimah studies two pairs of languages — some typologically related and others unrelated — to explore cross-linguistic influences (CLI) and interactions. CLI happens when speakers know two or more languages; those languages often share some features but differ in others. So, how do these features influence and interact with each other when speakers use one language? This question arises from the fact that when bilinguals speak one language, the other language remains active; it isn't completely turned off in the speaker’s mind. Halimah aims to answer how context and proficiency impact the interactions between shared and unshared features in bilinguals’ languages. In other words, how do bilinguals use features of their first language that are similar to their second, and how do they manage the differences?