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:

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Parents used more gestures (to show, offer, request) when speaking Lazuri (ancestral language) to their 15-48mo children than when speaking Turkish (dominant language), and kids gestured-to more spoke more Lazuri back Yuksel, Brooks 2017 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… #103papers

Selected tweets:

• The Moon

• Tulip & Turban Etymology

• Um & Uh

• Bilady Fozzie

• IPA Baby Book

• Linguist Meetup in Linguaglossa?

• Because Internet as Textbook Season

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