Bilingualism is the norm, not the exception. In recent years, the research on bilingualism has revealed exciting new findings about how people grow up and live with two or more languages in different contexts.

But are all bilinguals the same? Contrary to the view that bilinguals are two monolinguals in one person, the emerging evidence shows that bilinguals differ by virtue of where they live and how they use their languages. In this talk, I discuss recent discoveries about bilingualism and its influences on the brain, mind, and behavior.

Anne L. Beatty-Martínez, lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, specialises in the language science of bilingualism. Her research has two intertwined strands: one that examines how cognition supports language use and another that asks how language use impacts cognition itself. In her work, she capitalizes on the diversity and variability in people’s experiences to better understand how the brain adapts to the demands of more than one language