Kickstarting a new international project looking at multilingual experiences and how they affect cognition and the brain

Last week saw the beginning of our new project titled “Using diversity in multilingual experience as a model to study neural plasticity”. The project is funded by the Norwegian Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) Young Investigator Grant and led by Dr Vincent DeLuca (University of Tromso, Norway), with Gigi Luk (McGill University, Canada), Merel Keijzer (University of Groningen, Netherlands), Zofia Wodniecka (Jagiellonian University, Poland) and Christos Pliatsikas (University of Reading, UK) as Co-Is.

The first of three workshops took place in Oslo, looking at brain plasticity related to development and life experiences. In a series of exciting conversations, our guest speakers Martin Lövdén (University of Gothenburg), Carl-Johan Boraxbekk (University of Copenhagen), Christian Tamnes (University of Oslo), and Alexis Hervais-Adelman (University of Geneva) helped us revisit and reevaluate the available evidence for bilingualism-induced neuroplasticity in the healthy brain aross the lifespan- great food for thought!

We look forward to the second workshop, which will be about individual differences in the study of bilingualism and will take place in Tromso in March 2025!