Ingenious: Julie Sedivy - Issue 47: Consciousness

The purpose of language is to reveal the contents of our minds, says Julie Sedivy. We are social animals and language is what springs us from our isolated selves and unites us with others. Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She specializes in psycholinguistics, the psychology of language, notably the psychological pressures that give birth to language and comprehension. More recently Sedivy has been writing about language in her own life. She was born in Czechoslovakia, spent time as a kid in Austria and Italy, and came of age in Canada. She speaks Czech, French, and English, and gets by in Spanish, Italian, and German.