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Virtual reality (VR) provides an immersive and interactive setting for language learning, allowing learners to practise various aspects of language in context-rich, naturalistic environments. Unlike traditional book-based methods, VR-based language training is expected to engage a broader network of brain regions by integrating sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. This raises important questions in the field of experience-dependent brain plasticity—specifically, whether immersive learning leads to more widespread or qualitatively different neural changes compared to more focal learning approaches. The talk will open with an overview of short- and long-term brain plasticity, setting the stage for understanding how the brain adapts during language learning. It will then present key findings from research on virtual reality-based language training, highlighting its potential to enhance learning through immersive experiences. Finally, the talk will share preliminary results from ongoing studies on single-session Mandarin learning in VR, along with the recent development of an interactive language puzzle game aimed at exploring cognitive engagement and neural activation in virtual environments.

Event date: 12/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. Johan MÅRTENSSON
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

In the last two decades the contribution of neuroscience to bilingualism, in terms of discovering the neural architecture, has been enormous. Up-to-date we know how bi- and multilinguals store their languages, how and where they are represented in the human brain and how bilinguals control their languages in order to avoid unwanted language interferences during speech. Old myths that distinct languages are differently stored in the brain have been completed confuted. Neuroscientific studies have also highlighted neural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals for several cognitive functions, even for those circumstances where no behavioral differences exist. Neuroimaging studies have further shown different neural aging trajectories for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals underlining that the bilingual brain may be better protected against aging effects and cognitive decline.

During my presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the state of the art and then illustrate and discuss new research lines such as studying the foreign language effect, the effects of sleep and bilingualism on general cognition, the effects of linguistic distance on the bilingual brain and the importance of study the bilingual connectome. Lastly, we will discuss how to focus on individual differences in bilingualism research and heritage language speakers.

Event date: 8/10/2025
Speaker: Prof. Jubin ABUTALEBI
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Until recently, there were two main ways of obtaining information about words and expressions. The first was to analyze large text data sets (corpora) and calculate the frequency with which words and phrases occur, as well as the typical contexts in which they occur. The second was to ask participants to provide subjective information about words and phrases, such as the familiarity of the stimuli or the age at which they are typically acquired. The development of large language models has given us a third option. Instead of asking participants for information, we can query large language models. The results show that the information obtained from those models is just as good and often even better than the information obtained from people, especially when the model is tuned to a few thousand stimuli.

Event date: 30/05/2025
Speaker: Prof. Marc BRYSBAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

The idea of translanguaging has disrupted much of the thinking about language, communication and learning and raised some fundamental questions about human language and human cognition. One of these questions concerns an assumption that seems to underlie a great deal of the work on intercultural communication, and that is, speakers of different named languages not only use language differently, but also think differently and have different worldviews. In this talk, I want to invite the participants to rethink about this issue, from the perspective of Translanguaging, which posits that bilinguals and multilinguals do not think unilingually and thinking goes beyond named languages and indeed beyond what has traditionally been conceived as linguistic versus non-linguistic processes. I offer my views on the existing work in intercultural communication and cross-linguistic studies of cognitive processing and Linguistic Relativity. Implications of this common-humanity-based conceptual stance for intercultural communication including business and workplace lingua franca communication, as well as for language learning and pedagogy, and research design are discussed.

Event date: 18/07/2024
Speaker: Prof. Wei LI (University College London)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Neuroemergentism, (NM) is a novel framework which has sought to consider language development as involving the organization and reorganization of cognition and its underlying neural substrate. Work to support this framework comes from studies of language and cognitive development. In this talk, I will focus on two separate levels, the sensorimotor plasticity needed to adjust to new input and the cognitive flexibility needed to select between these competing sources of information. This talk will discuss both these levels with regard to the neurocognitive adaptations seen in bilinguals. This will include structural brain differences in monolinguals and bilinguals that vary in the age of second language acquisition. In the second part, of the talk work that has focused on the cognitive flexibility will be presented. This will focus on the adaptations of the basal ganglia and frontostriatal tracts as a gating mechanism crucial for selecting the correct motor response. This includes newer work which links genes associated with dopamine to cognitive and language flexibility in bilinguals. The ways in which sensorimotor plasticity and cognitive flexibility represent accurate but incomplete conceptualizations of the competitive processes involved in language and cognitive processing will be discussed. The talk will conclude with potential future directions using an NM framework.

I will discuss how co-speech (i.e., speech-accompanying) gestures relate to language and conceptualisation underlying language. I will focus on “representational gestures”, which can depict motion, action, and shape or can indicate locations. I will provide evidence for the following two points. Various aspects of language shape co-speech gestures. Conversely, the way we produce co-speech gestures can shape language. I will discuss these issues in relation to manner and path in motion event descriptions, clause-linkage types in complex event descriptions, and metaphor. I will conclude that gesture and language are parts of a "conceptualisation engine”, which takes advantage of unique strengths of spatio-motoric representation and linguistic representation.