Anusha EPQ

 It is well known that the more you surround yourself with a language the more you are able to understand and learn new words and sentences. This is what happened to children in Norway who, forced in close proximity with their parents, they were were to pick up or improve their mother tongue.  The article in "The Conversation" by Liquan Liu summarises briefly how his research with 200 multilingual children in Norway showed that the pandemic helped multilingual children to improve their home language.   Multilingual children rarely use all their languages in the same contexts or with the same frequency. This is often perceived as being more or less “advanced” in one language than the other, but in reality multilingual speakers use their languages as best fits their needs.  Our study found children’s home language literacy improved during the pandemic. However   some parents were worried about the development of kids’ societal language, especially when it was not spoken at home

 As I tried to find more research papers on how bi/multilingual children's brains differ from monolingual children's and bi/multilingual adults' I came across a research paper which investigate the difference in emotional intelligence between bilingual and monolingual children.  paralanguage = non-lexical component of communication by speech for example intonation, pitch and speed of speaking, hesitation noises, gesture and face expressions. (e.g. a happy event expressed in a sad voice) Adults are usually used to take into consideration both content and paralanguage in their daily conversations ; that is how we understand sarcasm and irony. However it has been proven that children struggle to do so : six-year-olds have difficulty in recognizing sarcasm and irony. Children tend to pay more attention to content than paralanguage. A previous research,  Morton and Trehub (2001) , showed how when content and paralanguage matched, both children and adults could accurately identi

  I managed to complete all of the tasks I set myself at the start of this month although I had some difficulties finding a good video representing multilingual children. Overall, I found reading and analysing this research paper easier than my first one as I already knew an efficient way of highlighting and annotating the research paper.  For November, I plan to finish reading the document I started reading on October and make a blog post summarising it. I also plan to find more researches about multilingual brain in children and teenagers, and if I can find any reliable researches on the effect of age of acquisition of the second language in terms of brain structure and connectivity, I will make a blog post about this sub-topic.  I have also decided to focus my project on specifically bi/multilingual children’s brain as I have realised, from the sources online, that focusing on the whole concept of bi/multilingual brain is broad and it has many factors which affects it. Given the com

  This is the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and there are multiple researches to show that this part of the brain has a role in language processing. As a result, it has been proven that the IFG's functional connectivity and structure is different in bilingual adults than monolingual adults. However some of these changes occur in childhood whereas others occur later in childhood or adolescence. The "Young children in different linguistic environments : A multimodal neuroimaging study of the inferior frontal gyrus" research paper by Camilia Thieba exactly tried to find out how this area of the brain in childhood is affected by comparing bi/multilingual children to monolingual children. To do so, MRI and T1-weighted MRI  were used in this research to measure the functional connectivity and structure of the IFG.  44 children were assessed in this research, 22 from a multilingual background and 22 from a monolingual background. The control variables in this research were : - a