Artificial language - A deliberately constructed symbol system such as a programming language, Esperanto, Klingon, Brocanto, or a lab-made miniature language. (Ch 10)
Bouba-kiki effect - A sound-symbolism effect where people map rounded sounds to rounded shapes and sharp sounds to jagged shapes above chance. (Ch 9)
Cognitive reserve - Functional resilience that lets people maintain cognitive performance despite aging, disease, stress, or neural decline. (Ch 5)
Cultural frame switching - The shift in norms, self-construal, gestures, values, and expectations that can occur when a multilingual person switches language. (Ch 6)
Executive function - Cognitive control processes including attention, inhibition, switching, monitoring, and working memory. (Ch 5)
Foreign language effect - The tendency for non-native language contexts to reduce emotional immediacy and change moral, financial, medical, or risk decisions. (Ch 1, Ch 6)
Grammatical gender - A language system that classifies nouns into gender-like categories; it can influence memory, description, and mental representation. (Ch 8)
Language attrition - Partial loss or reduced accessibility of a previously known language, often after migration, adoption, or long disuse. (Epilogue)
Language-dependent memory - Improved memory retrieval when the language at recall matches the language active during encoding. (Ch 1, Ch 6)
Linguistic relativity - The idea that language influences, but does not fully determine, thought and perception. (Ch 3)
McGurk effect - A multisensory speech illusion in which mismatched auditory and visual speech cues produce a third perceived sound. (Ch 3)
Metalinguistic awareness - Awareness that words are symbols and that objects and names do not map one-to-one. (Ch 5)
Neural reserve - Structural and functional brain reinforcement, such as grey matter, white matter, and connectivity changes, that supports cognitive resilience. (Ch 5)
Parallel activation - Simultaneous activation of multiple languages, sounds, meanings, spellings, signs, or translations in a multilingual mind. (Ch 2)
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - A family of claims about language shaping thought, ranging from strong determinism to weaker relativity. (Ch 3)
Sound symbolism - Non-arbitrary association between sound form and meaning or perception. (Ch 9)
Speech register - A language variety selected for context, audience, role, or social meaning. (Ch 7)
Theory of mind - The ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, and knowledge to oneself and others, including beliefs that differ from one's own. (Ch 5)
Translation - Re-creation of meaning across languages and cultures, not simple word replacement. (Ch 9)
WEIRD sample - Research populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; overreliance on them limits generalization. (Ch 11)