J-Spring 2022: Simone de Gijt – Wired! How your brain learns new (programming) languages

How much do you know about the way you are wired? About the computer we call “our brain”? Of course we know that we use it every day, but are you also aware of the fact that all of us are in some sense linguistics. We analyse, study and perfect language every day. For us, language is a tool and as with every tool we need to know what it does in order to use it optimally. Especially because our coding languages are evolving even faster than spoken languages would and the question of mastering multiple coding languages is rising by the day. That’s why it is so useful to have a deeper understanding of how your brain stores and uses language. As a previous speech-and-language therapist I would like to give you a better understanding of how we learn a new language, which parts of the brain are involved and how this knowledge can help us in the never-ending changing world of software development!