Looking for Gaelic-speaking children to take part in research

January 22, 2021 by

A research team from the University of Edinburgh is looking at how bilingual children learn Gaelic and English and which areas of the languages are hard for them. The project is investigating how children in Gaelic-medium education (GME) in Scotland learn Gaelic in order to identify areas of difficulty for children with typical development and for those at risk of language impairment in these schools.

The study is looking to recruit children from Primary 2 to Primary 5 with typical development or whose parents, teachers and/or Additional Support Needs Co-ordinators (ASNCOs) have expressed concerns about their language development in their dominant language (be it English or Gaelic). The study is being conducted online by video conference during a time suitable for parents and children.

Read the letter to parents in Gaelic and English here (pdf)

Share the project flyer (pdf)

This work is led by Dr Vicky Chondrogianni, our Bilingualism Matters Edinburgh Programme Director for Bilingual Development and Developmental Language Disorders.

If you would like to take part, or would like more information, please contact Catriona crennie2@ed.ac.uk

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Short-term language learning aids mental agility

April 28, 2016 by

Mental agility can be boosted by even a short period of learning a language, suggests a new study by Bilingualism Matters researchers.

Students aged 18 – 78 were tested on their attention levels before and after a one-week intensive Gaelic course on the Isle of Skye. Researchers compared these results with those of people who completed a one week course that did not involve learning a new language, and with a group who did not complete any course.

At the end of the week, participants on the language course performed significantly better than those who did not take any course. This improvement was found for learners of all ages, from 18 to 78 years. There was no difference between those who took a non-language course and those who took no course.

Researchers also found that these benefits could be maintained with regular practice. Nine months after the initial course, all those who had practised five hours or more per week improved from their baseline performance. [Read more…]

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Skye is the limit – or, the power of mad ideas

April 27, 2016 by

Dr Thomas Bak Thomas H Bak is a reader in Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to his work with Bilingualism Matters, he is a member of the Centre for Cognitive Ageing & Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE) and the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (CCBS).

Have you ever had an idea that seemed to you great but scarily mad, something that really excited you but you didn’t dare to share even with your closest friends? Well, that’s how I felt two years ago, when it suddenly crossed my mind that we could test attention in people attending a one-week Gaelic course on the Isle of Skye. The idea did not come out of nothing: by then, we had already analysed the data from a study subsequently published in Cognition [1]. There we found that first year students of modern languages and of other humanities (English literature, history etc) performed equally well in a test of attentional switching at the beginning of their studies. However, by the end of the fourth year the language students, by then quite fluent in their chosen language, outperformed their colleagues from other faculties. [Read more…]

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