The groundbreaking science of how and why we talk, and how this ability impacts every area of our lives.
Coming June 2025 from Penguin Random House.
Hi! I’m Maryellen.
I am an author and researcher interested in psycholinguistics, the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages.
I have researched the impact of language in children, young adults, elderly adults, and patients with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as language production in six different languages.
“Incidentally, on the marvels of speaking, there is a neat new book on the horizon teaching us how talking develops kids’ minds, how it should be more central to education than just listening quietly, how it can help us organize our thoughts and calm ourselves down, and even hold off dementia. In Maryellen MacDonald’s “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World,” you get the sense of casual speech as awesome that I was just trying to get across.”
— John McWorter, New York Times, March 20, 2025
What People Are Saying About More than Words
“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— Julie Sedivy, author of Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love
“A warm and fascinating account of the beautiful, strenuous, fumbling act of pressing nebulous thoughts into sentences, sure to provoke new respect for everyday chatter.”
— Julie Sedivy, author of Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love
“Weaving together research, personal stories, quotes, and even self-help advice, this is a book about talking that is not about communication—instead, it is about how talking sharpens focus, modulates emotions, improves memory, scaffolds learning, benefits aging, and so much more.”
— Viorica Marian, Professor at Northwestern University and author of The Power of Language