Something you always wanted to know about gender-inclusive language (but were afraid to ask)
Few other issues provoke more heated debates nowadays than attempts to make language more gender-inclusive.
Communicative difficulties faced by deaf children: A way forward
Children learn language with astonishing ease when they are exposed to it. Unfortunately, some children face circumstances where exposure to language from birth is more difficult as in the case of deaf children with hearing parents. This article describes the challenges these children face especially in developing countries and presents current scientific insights that provide a way forward.
Code-switching: One sentence, two languages
We live in a multicultural and multilingual world, where being able to communicate in more than one language is the norm for many people. As bilingualism plays such a fundamental role in our society, it has naturally become a topic of interest for the scientific community in recent decades. In particular, scientists are intrigued by a phenomenon they call code-switching, which is defined as ‘mixing or changing the structures, vocabulary and other components of at least two languages’.
Genetic factors in vocabulary development – Interview with Dr. Ellen Verhoef
Dr. Ellen Verhoef was a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She defended her thesis entitled ‘Why do we change how we speak? Multivariate genetic analyses of language and related traits across development and disorder’ on March 5 2021.
What I learned about language development during the COVID-19 lockdown – Part III: Bilingualism is what you make of it
Oh, the lockdowns… Thankfully the last one was more than a year ago (at the time of writing), and although it was challenging being at home so much, it also allowed me to spend much more time with my daughter. In my last two posts, I told you about how my then-one-and-a-half-year-old was starting to understand and produce her first sentences. Now a feisty three-year-old, she is talking nonstop and switching between two languages.