Day 22! Yay! When we speak two languages, both languages are simultaneously “active” at in the brain at the same time. Psycholinguists call this “co-activation”. But, we don’t feel this co-activation — we aren’t consciously aware that we’re always juggling both languages. (1/2 🧵)

Fun fact February Day 21! Part of learning how to “think” in a second language involves developing “form-meaning mappings.” Basically, we have “phonological” form (or what we hear), and orthographic form (or what we see written and spelled). (1/3 🧵)

Day 20! The month is feeling long! Language has a lot of ambiguity. Sometimes, multiple meanings can be activated at once, which can make it a little bit more difficult to process. (1/2 🧵)

Fun fact day 19! Language is arbitrary. In fact, that is one of the core tenets of linguistics. For example, that “bird” means “winged animal that flies and chirps” is completely arbitrary; likewise that “fugle” means “winged animal that flies and chirps” in Danish. (1/2 🧵)

Day 18! It’s fun fact day 18! Did you know there is technically a difference between “learning” a language and “acquiring” a language? (1/3 🧵)

Fun fact day 17! We process language incrementally, meaning word-by-word, as we take it all in. However, sometimes this leads us astray, as in the case of, for example, passive sentences. Take, for example, “the woman paid for the jewelry became rich”. (1/3 🧵)

Fun fact, day 16! Psycho and neurolinguists can use what’s called fMRI (a special type of MRI) to investigate which parts of your brain are active while you’re processing certain types of language. (1/2 🧵)

Fun fact — day 15! Give it up for day 15! In the last fun fact I shared, I discussed how our first language can be transferred into our second language (or, it influence our second language) and that creates accents. (1/2 🧵)

Fun fact — day 14! Do you know why we have accents? Well, one of the reasons is because the first language is transferred to the second language! More specifically, we transfer the sounds of our first language to our second language! And voilà, accents.

Fun fact — day 13! We hear a lot more language than we take in! This is called by “input” (all language we’re surrounded by) vs. “intake” (what we actually learn and remember). We’re surrounded by LOADS of new language every day! But we don’t remember or learn everything we hear. (1/2 🧵)

Fun fact, day 12! This one is a bit more personalized 🙂 Across five years and ten classes (upwards of 200+ students), I have asked every class “how do you define a native speaker.” (1/3 🧵).

Fun fact, day 11! Some scholars suggest that when you speak two languages, you have an “interlanguage”, or a mental grammar that is unique to the influence of both your first and second languages. (1/2 🧵)

Day 10! Continuing EEG fun facts, there are “neural signatures” (or, basically, brain waves that happen at different times and that are differently shaped) that suggest that we process oddities with meaning (semantics) differently than we process oddities with grammar (syntax). Pretty cool!

Day 9! (Almost caught up.) Linguists who study the brain are called psycholinguists and neurolinguists. Psycho- and neurolinguists can use a technique that measures brain waves to study how your brain responds to language. This is called electroencephalography, or EEG. (1/3 🧵)

Day 8! (Catching up from a busy couple days!) When you first hear a word begin to be a spoken, your brain has lots of other words activated at the same time, based on the commonalities in sound between all the words (1/2 🧵)

Day 7! (Just a touch late.) Did you know that babies can distinguish sounds in all languages until about 6 months to 1 year of age? Then, they begin to show preference towards their native language.

Day 6! (A little late!) Day 6 fun fact is that we develop sensitivity to sound even before we’re born — we begin to develop sensitivity to rhythm (what linguists call “prosodic patterns”) in utero!

There, there…

Day 5! Give it up for day five! Keeping on with the theme of the past few days, while we’re processing language, we’re also generating predictions about what comes next! (1/3 🧵)

Day 4! Continuing on in the theme of yesterday’s fun fact, when we process language, we process it “incrementally” ! Take the sentence “I like dancing.” (1/2 🧵)

Day 3! Today’s fun fact is that we process language in a millisecond-by-millsecond fashion! I’m including a video to illustrate JUST how fast that is — it took me 23 milliseconds just to start and stop my stopwatch!

It’s Day 2! Did you know that you can technically “lose” or forget parts of your first language? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For example, if you spend a lot of time speaking your second language, you might become more proficient in your second language than your first! (1/3 🧵)

It’s February 1st, which means it’s Fun Fact February! Every day this month, I’m sharing a new fun fact about second language acquisition/language processing. Today’s fun fact… (1/2 🧵)

Check out my new Substack post, breaking down the difference between our mind and our brain! open.substack.com/pub/gracetal...

How does bilingualism impact our mind and our brain? Check out my new Substack post! In short, when we speak multiple languages, they’re all “active” at the same time. Our brain performs a constant “juggling act” when we speak multiple languages! substack.com/@gracetalksl...

How do you define bilingualism — or can we define it? After struggling a bit to figure out how I want my SciComm endeavors to take shape after IG, I’ve taken to Substack. Check out my two most recent posts and share widely to non-linguists! substack.com/@gracetalksl...

On IG I relied a lot on Canva and photo carousels, but with BlueSky’s four photo limit, I might need to adjust some things. But here are some remnants I still have from my IG account.

I’ll make this my inaugural post on my SciComm BlueSky — hi, I’m Grace, I’m a graduating PhD candidate from UF researching L2 sentence processing and bilingualism. I migrated from IG and was GraceTalksLanguage on there, communicating SLA/language and Brain/bilingualism to non-expert audiences.