Nowadays the majority of the world's population is bilingual/multilingual, mainly due to English as lingua-franca and international policies on foreign language education. In the past year many researchers have been investigating the cognitive aspects of foreign language learning and bilingualism, and here are some of their discoveries.
In Xenolinguistics, Diana Reed Slattery mixes research on language, psychedelics, and consciousness in a trippy cocktail which will warp your mind like the characters of Glide, the symbolic language she “downloaded” in an altered state of consciousness.
The conference Languages of trauma, which took place between 25-26 November in Berlin, brought together scholars of cultural/film/media studies to discuss about the body/psyche, historiography, traumatology, and visual media -- and everything in between. Here I will talk only about two of the seven talks, which made a bigger impression on me -- namely on the theme Audio-visualization of trauma and history of (psycho)traumatology, jointly discussed by Julia Köhne and Anne Freese.
Waking up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, dressing up to step out in a freezing morning of November, grabbing quickly a double espresso and hopping on a train... only motivated to attend the 10th Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik, an annual event about research on neurology, methods, and therapy of various speech-language impairments (e.g., dyslexia, aphasia, dysphagia, specific language impairment) which takes place at Campus Griebnitzsee of Potsdam University, Germany. This year's theme was "Linguistics meets speech-language therapy", covered in talks, posters, workshops, and a photo exhibition.
La suppression de l’apprentissage de l’écriture manuscrite dans les écoles en Finlande a déclanché un débat animé dans l’Europe entière. Il est évident que depuis l’utilisation de l’ordinateur, l’écriture cursive disparaît peu à peu au profit des claviers. Mais devons-nous capituler face à la technologie et demander aux enfants de refermer les cahiers et ouvrir les laptops ?