Gramer Girl here, I'm a neon-foggerty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

Writing, History, Rules, and Cool stuff.

Today, I have two cool segments.

First, we'll talk about being bilingual and how it can change your perception of time.

And second, we'll talk about the languages of Star Wars.

This next segment is by Pano's Athenisopolis.

It turns out Hollywood got it half-right.

In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louis Banks, who's trying to decipher an

alien language.

She discovers the way the aliens talk about time gives them power to see into the future.

So as Banks learns their language, she also begins to see through time.

As one character in the movie says, learning a foreign language rewires your brain.

My new study, which I worked on with linguist Immanuel Byland, shows that bilinguals do indeed

think about time differently depending on the language context in which they're estimating

the duration of events.

But unlike Hollywood, bilinguals sadly can't see into the future.

However, this study does show that learning a new way to talk about time really does

rewire the brain.

Our findings are the first psychophysical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals.

We've known for some time that bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly

and often unconsciously, a phenomenon called code switching.

...