Itziar Laka graduated in basque philology (UPV/EHU) and received a PhD in linguistics and philosophy from MIT. After five years as assistant professor at the University of Rochester, she is now full professor at the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies and director of The Bilingual Mind research group at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Her current research combines theoretical linguistics and experimental methods from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics to inquire into the neural representation and processing of language, with a strong focus on syntax and bilingualism.
…and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains, within the sound of silence. (Simon and Garfunkel, The sound of silence 1964) Sound is made of waves. One fundamental trick of speech is that it surfs those waves by slicing them up into discrete bits. Recently, Mesgarani et al. (2014) (see also ) […]
Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary talent for negotiation. He was also an outstanding public speaker. Among the many words of wisdom he left behind, there is this piece of advice for negotiations: “ If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you […]
Jabberwocky is the title of a famous poem by Lewis Carroll[1], a poem very much liked by linguists because it beautifully illustrates the crucial role that function words play in language. Function words are the little words no one pays much attention to, although they are the true keepers of grammar. In fact, language cannot […]
Talking seems easy to us, so much so that we take it for granted, but the cognitive machinery responsible for this capacity is extremely complex. Among the many cognitive processes involved in speaking, people who know more than one language face an added challenge: they not only need to ensure that the words they select […]
A dear biologist friend once complained to me that the Basque verb hausnartu is used to mean both “to ruminate”, and “to ponder over”. He saw this as an example of very bad language behavior that should not be encouraged. I replied by noting that this can hardly be a whim of our native tongue […]
Michelangelo famously claimed he merely carved out sculptures he saw trapped inside the stone. His genius involved a powerful internal vision that he masterly imposed on external matter. We can think of Michelangelo’s conception of sculpture when we look at human babies acquiring language, because babies, like sculptors, carve out the language they hear in […]