Glossary

 As I am researching about the effect of multilingualism on the brain structure I have realised that there a lot of terminologies and abbreviations regarding different parts of the brain that I am not familiar with. Therefore to make my research easier, I am going to use this post to make a glossary with all of the new words I come across during my EPQ.

1. Voxel-based morphometry VBM = measures GM density or volume in a given region

2. Gyrus = ridge like elevation found on surface of the cerebral cortex and are made up of grey matter

3. Sulcus = a groove in the cerebral cortex which surround each gyrus

4. Age of acquisition AoA

5. Left anterior cingulate cortex ACC

6. Insula INS

7. Parietal lobule

8. Planum temporal PT

9. Cerebral cortex = the brain's outermost layer

10. Thalamus

11. Basal ganglia = group of subcortical nuclei near the center of the brain

12. Inferior frontal gyrus = engaged in language processing


13. Cognates = when a word has the same linguistic derivation as another ( e.g. attention - English, attenzione - Italian )

14. Fractional anisotropy = MRI biomarkers of white matter microstructure, also commonly known as FA

15. Sequential bilinguals = person become bilingual by first learning a language and then another

16. Simultaneous bilinguals = person become bilingual by learning both languages at the same time

17. Intra-sentential switches = switching language in the middle of a sentence

18. Inter-sentential switches = switching language between sentences








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