Becoming a "Be-er" of Other People

For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly into reflexes, as do thousands of lexical items, and the second language becomes more and more rooted, more and more genuine. One gradually becomes a fluent thinker in...

 Bilinguals Perform Better at Non-Verbal Tests

When communicating, bilinguals must successfully manage two conflicting languages; one must be accessed whilst the other is suppressed, in order to avoid involuntary language switching. The cognitive demands of this task are thought to be the origin of the bilingual advantage in executive control. A series of studies have demonstrated that bilinguals outperform their peers on tests of non-linguistic interference. Bilingual children, middle aged adults and older adults consistently record fa...

 How Math Books Are Like Poetry Books

If you pick up a textbook on poetry and thumb the pages, you will see poems interspersed between explanations, explanations that English professors will call prose. Prose differs from poetry in that it is a major subcategory of how language is used. Prose encompasses all the normal uses: novels, texts, newspapers, magazines, letter writing, and such. But poetry is different! Poetry is a highly charged telescopic (and sometimes rhythmic) use of the English language, which is employed to simul...

 Children Learn New Languages More Easily Than Adults

Other, less tragic kinds of evidence also support this idea. Most people have a much more difficult time learning a second language late in life than they do in childhood. Immigrants may try to learn the language of their new country, only to be outdone by their own children. When we visit a foreign country for a while, our kids seem to be happily chatting with the other kids in the playground, while we are still painfully looking through the phrase books. When we learn a second language past...

 Defending the Purity of the English Language

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.