Carmen Silva-Corvalán is a Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Southern California, where she taught since she obtained her doctoral degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1979. Silva-Corvalán has published extensively on bilingualism and language contact, and on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic constraints which condition syntactic variation. Silva-Corvalan was one of the four chief editors of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Cambridge University Press.
Research
Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years
In her 2014 book, Carmen Silva-Corvalán describes how she studied the development of bilingual language acquisition. Throughout this book she presents her findings of a longitudinal study she ran focusing on two developing English-Spanish bilinguals. Silva-Corvalán studied how these children can simultaneously learn two languages at the same time (Ruiz-Sanchez, 2015). The purpose of this study is to investigate the how much exposure and use of the two languages is needed in order to achieve proficiency in the language and its grammar. The two bilinguals that were studied are brothers from Los Angeles who she follows across several transitional periods for six years. Her main findings of this study were how many different factors play a part in providing explanations for language acquisition. These factors include the child's proficiency in the language and their amount exposure to the language. Silva-Corvalán's study has deepened our understanding of early bilingual language acquisition and Spanish language acquisition in general (Ruiz-Sanchez, 2015).
Extension of "" Silva-Corvalán was interested in learning more about the changing and death of language. When two languages are introduced to one another, a primary and a secondary, the primary language typically has more influence over the secondary language. Silva-Corvalán explored the use of the verb estar in bilingual Spanish speakers to better understand this phenomenon. She wanted to discover how estar has changed in bilingual usage, why estar was so adaptable for the wide application, and how bilingual contact affected this change. Silva-Corvalán discovered that estar had a decrease in meaning over time, and began to be used in a greater range of contexts. The distinction between and had lessened. There is a universal tendency of semantic bleaching, which is the loss of meaning or emphasis of a word over time, that is present in estar. This semantic bleaching is a result of the variety of Spanish speakers interacting with the English-speaking population in Los Angeles. This linguistic contact was the catalyst for a change from within Spanish. Overall, Silva-Corvalán found that direct English influences on this simplification were difficult to spot; these finding are similar to Nancy C. Dorian and her studies on the East Sutherland Gaelic (ESG) language in 1978.