Think about your brain as a kind of superprocessor, constantly running parallel operations at very high speed.

Now, what if you're multilingual?

In people who speak multiple languages there is a lot more interactivity and activation happening all the time.

It's Thursday, December 7th, but you don't have to wait until tomorrow because today is Science Friday.

I'm John Dankowski.

Dr. Vieerica Marion is a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern

University and she's author of the power of language, how the codes we use to think, speak, and live, transform our minds.

Here she is talking with Ira Plato on stage in Chicago.

It was part of an event at the Studebaker Theater. talking with Ira Flado on stage in Chicago.

It was part of an event at the Studebaker Theater,

presented with W.B. E. Z.

And Mind Works.

Let's listen in.

Dr. Marion, let's talk about multiple languages.

Did you get interested in that because you are multilingual?

How did you get interested in studying this?

That was certainly part of it.

So I grew up in Eastern Europe. We spoke Romanian at home with my family and then outside

the home Russian was the official language everywhere on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

And then I studied English in school and in French in college and

this is actually very typical for many people in Europe and not just in Europe. In fact the majority of world population, more than half of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual.

It is very common for people all over the world on every continent to grow up with two or more languages from early childhood and then learn additional

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