For a great part of the past century bilingualism was believed to affect intelligence negatively . Jespersen, in 1922, claimed that “the brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things.” Still, some people (wrongly) believe that children might get confused by exposure to […]
If you feel stuck for words every once in a while, the most straightforward answer is that there is nothing wrong with you. Fifty years ago, Roger Brown and David McNeill at Harvard University showed that it is possible to trigger “a state in which one cannot quite recall a familiar word but can recall […]
After Language evolution: The origin , we will go over some of the fundamental substrates of human language. As if mind or anatomy were not broad enough themselves, we will see how a host of structures contributes to language. Each of them has their own role in the emergence, use and change of language as […]
The number of people who speak one language (monolinguals) is rather small today , with many of us growing up with more than one language or learning another one during our lifetime. Language experts argue that what counts as speaking two languages (bilingualism) is not only a matter of the number of languages we speak […]
The usage of the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” is one of these cases in which, all of a sudden, we are told we have been saying something wrong all along. Lawrence Kaplan from the Alaska Native Language Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” do not mean the […]
1 Introduction Evolutionary linguistics encompasses the origins of language, the change within and across different languages, and the acquisition of language and languages by children and adults (Gong, Shuai, & Zhang, 2014). We shall start framing this voyage by looking back two centuries. Then, some theories of language origins seem to have displayed considerable ‘imagination’ […]
People who are diagnosed with dementia may initially report problems on memory and/or language that affect their activities of daily living. Once factors such as depression, delirium, or mild cognitive impairment, are disregarded, these people are typically referred to a neurologist, radiologist, and neuropsychologist or speech therapist who will help them to understand the reason […]
Researchers seem to be reassured and perhaps compete in remarking the complexity of their own topics of study. We language scientists, however, can sit back and let our topic do the talking. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are, broadly, the super-cogs in the language machinery, each recruiting a set of brain systems in […]
We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]
Imagine yourself listening to someone who is talking in a language very different from any one you know. Most probably, for you it will be just a series of meaningless noises. If, instead, you are listening to someone speaking in your own native language, usually the meaning of his or her utterances would be as […]