The primary objective of LESS is to examine how the mind reuses and repurposes linguistic knowledge when it is similar across languages, helping to avoid repetition in learning, and how this efficiency is implemented at the level of brain function. This phenomenon, called linguistic transfer, can be studied most meaningfully in multilingualism (three or more languages), because the learner has more linguistic experience/knowledge available. This rich background raises the stakes: choosing the right language, the one that is most similar to the language we are learning, becomes a crucial task that can lead to shortcuts in learning or to costly errors that must later be undone. LESS examines the psychological mechanisms and neurophysiological correlates behind this unconscious selection. In the process, it secondarily addresses the role of core cognitive components, such as attention and memory, in detecting and tracking cross-linguistic similarities that lead to linguistic transfer.
