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 […]
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 […]