anticipate Authors: Victoria Cano Sánchez & Patricia Fuente García, PhD candidates at the University of the Basque Country, Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies (UPV/EHU) and members of The Bilingual Mind Research Group (Gogo Elebiduna) Have you ever wondered why are we able to respond and comprehend others as fast as we do? The answer […]
Emotional Authors: Anna Hatzidaki, Assistant Professor and member of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics (BiPsy) Lab, Dept. of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA); Mikel Santesteban, Senior Researcher and member of The Bilingual Mind research group, Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Our brain is […]
Imagine this: you’re visiting the chimpanzee enclosure at a zoo. Some sit on the grass, chewing on leaves and scratching their heads, while others hang from the wooden beams. In a corner, a female is holding her baby. You can’t help but picture a human mom doing it in the exact same way. For a […]
Bilingualism, or the ability to speak two or more languages, has become increasingly important in today’s globalized world. Not only does it facilitate communication and cultural understanding between people of different languages and backgrounds, but it has also been shown to have cognitive benefits that can help promote healthy aging. Research has shown that bilingualism […]
Author: Marta Sánchez-López is a PhD candidate at the Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies (UPV/EHU), The Bilingual Mind research group. What if I told you that language can incriminate you? Yes, it is true, the way you speak tells so much about yourself. Humans use language to communicate about events of the world and […]
The acquisition of the native language (L1) is fast and unconscious. By the time children are 4-5 years old, their competence in the L1 is already adult-like (Aparici & Igualada, 2019). One of the underlying factors of this competence is linguistic exposure, since children constantly listen to their caretakers speak the native language. Another factor […]
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 […]
…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 […]