More Than Words

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"This beautifully written book by Maryellen MacDonald demonstrates how 'word-work' shapes both our experience of the world and the very brain that produced our capacity to articulate and generate our best thoughts." —MARYANNE WOLF, author of Proust and the Squid and Reader Come Home Humans are the only species that can transform internal ideas into talk, whether through speech, writing, or sign language. But why do we have this almost magical, special talent? It turns out that while talking allows us to share ideas and connect with one another, it isn’t just for communication. Other benefits of talking stem from the fact that it is hard work : we can understand speech up to 50 percent faster than we can create it ourselves. The complex processes in the brain that allow us to talk spill over and impact other areas of our lives in surprising ways. In this groundbreaking book, Maryellen MacDonald, a researcher and psycholinguist