Post written by François Grosjean. The influence of a first language on a second language in the form of interferences (transfers) is well accepted and well documented (see here). But until fairly ...

You may believe that you have forgotten the Chinese you spoke as a child, but your brain hasn't. Moreover, that "forgotten" first language may well influence what goes on in your brain when you speak ...

Post written by François Grosjean. In an earlier post on language forgetting, I mentioned a little American boy, Stephen, who had acquired Garo in India during his first years of life but who had ...

There are more than 560 languages spoken in Latin America. Most are dying native Indigenous languages, including Quechua, Guarani, and Aymara. There's Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and, of course, the ...

Leaving Saint Petersburg for Moscow recently, I needed to determine whether our train tickets were for an assigned seat in a specific car, or if it was open seating. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the ...

A team of British scientists claims to have isolated a gene that may be crucially involved in the development of speech and language. Dubbed FOXP2, it was found that the gene, when mutated, causes ...

This article is now available above as a Brainstorm podcast. You can subscribe to the Brainstorm podcast through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You have probably ...

Sigh. As if we don’t have enough divisiveness in this country, a familiar subset of Congressional Republicans are trotting out yet another discriminatory bill papered over with hollow rhetoric about ...