CMMR - Do multilinguals have more friends?
Dr Charlotte Kemp is an expert in multilingualism, having discovered in her PhD, which she did at the University of Edinburgh (2001), that polyglots possess superior metalinguistic awareness.
Dr Charlotte Kemp is an expert in multilingualism, having discovered in her PhD, which she did at the University of Edinburgh (2001), that polyglots possess superior metalinguistic awareness.
She has since been looking whether multilinguals, individuals who use three or more languages, are better at learning new languages than other individuals. In the paper she presented at BBK, she presented a study with the enticing research question “do multilinguals have more friends” – and “is the size of participants’ social networks related to a measure of their Theory of Mind”.
She presented a second study on connections between multilingualism, a measure of Theory of Mind and a measure of metalinguistic awareness. As happens in research, the results were rather disappointing. Dr Kemp was disarmingly modest in her presentation, and admitted that a plausible hypothesis can be rejected for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons.
You can view the online recording of the CMMR talk here.