Verbal fluency tests are one of the most widely used tests in neuropsychology . The oral form of the test that is used today was first introduced by Benton and colleagues in the 1960’s and is mainly administered for evaluation of subjects sus pected of having neurological damage . Administration of fluency tests is fast, simple […]
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 […]
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 […]
…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 […]