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The perils of small talk
The Greek philosopher Socrates famously claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” to which the 20th-century American philosopher Daniel Dennett replied: “The overly examined life is nothing to write home about either.” Fair
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Bilingual Babies: The Roots of Bilingualism in Newborns
It may not be obvious, but hearing two languages regularly during pregnancy puts infants on the road to bilingualism by birth. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
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Two Sides of the Same Coin: Speech and Gesture Mutually Interact to Enhance Comprehension
Your mother may have taught you that it’s rude to point, but according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, gesturing may actually help improve communication. Psychological scientist
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Un-total Recall: Amnesics Remember Grammar, but Not Meaning of New Sentences
Syntactic persistence is the tendency for speakers to produce sentences using similar grammatical patterns and rules of language as those they have used before. Although the way this occurs is not well understood, previous research
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Psychology in Singapore
When I was preparing to come to the National University of Singapore (NUS) for a one-year visiting appointment in 1991 (a stay which has now stretched to 17 years), many of my friends and colleagues
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Talk to the Hand: New Insights into the Evolution of Language and Gesture
In his book Me Talk Pretty One Day, humorist David Sedaris chronicled his pain at trying to learn French, in France, at age 41. His commiseration with a fellow language student sounds like it could
