Science for everybody

Science for everybody

Are bilinguals smarter than monolinguals?

Almost 43% percent of the world population are bilingual meaning that they can speak two languages fluently! There are some misconceptions that bilingualism can cause confusion or language delays! Nevertheless, recent research shows that mixing two languages is good for the brain. People that speak more than one language often must switch between languages. This means that they often must suppress one language when talking in another language. For instance, when looking at a dog, a monolingual English speaker will say ‘dog’. But to a bilingual, two alternatives present

Science for everybody

How does cognitive system shape language?

Can you stop yourself from understanding when someone is speaking to you or around you in your language? One of the most striking properties of the human mind is its ability to interpret speech in real-time. As you are listening, your cognitive system instantly provides the meanings of the words and the rules of grammar to induce a coherent overall interpretation. In everyday life, you predominantly encounter subject-verb-object sentences (the man that pushes the boy has a red shirt), thus the brain gets a lot of training with this type of sentence (aka canonical constr

Science for everybody

How does language shape cognition?

I looked at this relationship through the lens of gestures! Gestures provide a “window on the mind” (Goldin-Meadow, 2003) To be able to answer this question, I started by studying language and gesture production systems, as gestures provide a “window on the mind”. I targeted the Persian language as it is understudied and also I speak it. I collected data from many Farsi-speaking adults as they described different types of motion events (jumping toward a door). I particularly focused on how they phrased and verbalized the events and how they gestured as they talked (gest