July 2022: In which I get my brain scanned!
Hello!
This month's Lingthusiasm episodes were a special double feature from my trip to Boston to get my brain scanned and finally discover whether I am one of the extremely special left-handed people who has their language centres on the right or both sides of the brain instead of the left. Spoiler: I am not, mine is on the right, just like most other people, left- and right-handed.
However! It was still really neat to take off all my metal items and go in the massive magnet that is an MRI machine and hear about language in the brain with Ev Fedorenko and what specifically was being tested in the experiments I participated in, with Saima Malik-Moraleda. (You can listen to the episodes in either order, depending on how much you like ~suspense~)
The #103papers reading project is still (still!) going on, in which I finally got through the enormous Indo-European section and learned some things about languages like Lazuri:
![Twitter avatar for @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/GretchenAMcC.jpg)
![Encouraging usage of an endangered ancestral language: A supportive role for caregivers’ deictic gestures
Peri Yuksel
Patricia J. Brooks
Many ancestral languages (AL) are at imminent risk of extinction due to societal changes that pressure minority communities to assimilate with dominant cultures and forego usage of their AL. This study aimed to encourage caregiver–child dyads to converse in Lazuri, an endangered AL in Rize, Turkey. Dyads (N = 59; child age M = 30.7 months, range 15–48) were asked to speak Lazuri while playing with culturally appropriate toys
for 20 minutes. Utterances were coded for language and accompanying gestures. With children speaking mostly in Turkish, caregivers experienced difficulties maintaining AL usage, yet were generally compliant with instructions. Caregivers more often produced deictic gestures when speaking Lazuri than when speaking Turkish, suggesting that children’s lack of AL proficiency influenced their gesturing. Moreover, caregivers who produced](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFYJ_Ru3XwAAAC6K.png)
Selected tweets:
This month's image is a picture of my brain doing language!! Okay, admittedly, it looks a lot like all of the other brain scans that people get, but this one's mine!!!
Thanks for coming along,
Gretchen