We’re running a Lingthusiasm listener survey for the third and final time! As part of our eighth anniversary celebrations, we’re running this survey as a way to learn more about our listeners, get your suggestions for topics, and to run some linguistic experiments!
If you did the survey in a previous year, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There’s also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular!
We’ll have the results from this survey in an episode for you in 2025, as well as future research publications.
This project has ethics approval from La Trobe University (Ethics Reference Number HEC22181). The Participant Information Statement is available at the survey link.
Lingthusiasm Episode 70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking -
happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the
other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain
scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly
one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus
nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to
audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak.
In
this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina
Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA about figuring out which
parts of the brain do language things! We talk about how we can use
brain scans to compare language with other things your brain can do,
such as solving visual puzzles, math problems, music, and inferring
things about other people’s mental states, as well as comparing how the
brains of multilingual people process their various languages. We also
talk about the results of the fMRI language experiments that Gretchen
got to be a participant in: which side is doing most of her language
processing and how active her brain is for French compared to English.
In this month’s bonus episode
we get enthusiastic about language inside an MRI machine! Gretchen
talks with Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in Speech and
Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard University in Boston, USA,
about the details of what it was like inside the MRI machine doing the
studies we reported on here - it’s a Lingthusiasm language-in-the-brain
interview double feature!
Alice in the Language Localizer Wonderland - for more information about the study and
if you happen to be in the Boston area and want to participate! They’re
currently especially looking for people who are multilingual or speak a conlang including Esperanto,
Klingon, High Valyrian, or Dothraki (for which you can get travel
funding…), but other studies will also come along if you’re reading
this from the future.
If you wish you could see pictures of
your brain and aren’t in the Boston area, keep an eye out for any other
large research universities you might be near, as many are looking for
participants! (Googling “research subject pool” + name of a local
university may help find something.)
Here’s the image of Gretchen’s brain and a graph of her responses to listening to various languages:
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This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
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