I n a 2017 interview, the famous actress Kate Walsh – whom you may know from the TV show Grey’s anatomy – reported the following: “ I started having more cognitive difficulties. It felt like aphasia [language problems] , but it was not just not being able to find words; I would lose my train […]
Author: Fernando Giraldez is currently Professor of Physiology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and has a broad experience in teaching and research in Neuroscience and Developmental Biology. The view that music, maths and language are related is quite widespread. We know that they share common abstract properties and their associated skills and abilities […]
Do you remember the “Little Red Riding Hood” story – the beloved fairy tale that your parents used to read to you before bed? Besides putting you and many other children across the globe to sleep, this story is a great “spontaneous speech” resource to assess language impairments in people with neurological disorders. An interesting […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]