Language & the Brain English Linguistics Sesson 3

THE HUMAN BRAIN The brain is composed of neurons, nerve cells that are the basic information processing units of the ner vous system. The cerebral cortex is the gray wrinkled mass that s its over the rest of the brain and accounts for langua ge representation and processing. The longitudinal fissure separates the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum is the bundle of nerve fibers t hat connects the two hemispheres.

So far, we know that:

What happens if brains areas that participate in language production are damaged? 3-D Brain Images 3-D imaging of Brain structure and functions – 2-D images of Brain structure and functions – mlhttp://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/sagittal.ht ml

Broca & Wernicke Areas Broca Aphasia – 013.htmlhttp:// 013.html –"Yes... Monday... Dad, and Dad... hospital, and... Wednesday, Wednesday, nine o'clock and... Thursday, ten o'clock... doctors, two, two... doctors and... teeth, yah. And a doctor... girl, and gums, and I." – “Me... build-ing... chairs, no, no cab-in-ets. One, saw... then, cutting wood... working..."

Broca Aphasia Broca's patients turn out to have a comprehension problem, when carefully tested a. passive sentences i. The dog chased the cat ii. The girl threw the ball iii. The cat was chased by the dog iv. The ball was thrown by the girl --> using word order 'strategies' rather than syntax b. attention to determiners i. He showed her baby pictures ii. He showed her the baby pictures iii. He showed her baby the pictures --> deficit may be in syntactic component of language

Wernicke Areas Wernicke Aphasia: – 101.htmlhttp:// 101.html Examiner: What kind of work have you done? Patient: We, the kids, all of us, and I, we were working for a long time in the... you know... it's the kind of space, I mean place rear to the spedawn... Examiner: Excuse me, but I wanted to know what work you have been doing. Patient: If you had said that, we had said that, poomer, near the fortunate, porpunate, tamppoo, all around the fourth of martz. Oh, I get all confused.

Wernicke’s Aphasia Wernicke's patients clearly don't have just a comprehension problem a. speech is typically somewhat incoherent b. patients perform very poorly on semantic judgments dog cat turnip man woman trout --> deficit may be in semantic component of language

Parkinson’s disease & regular past tense verbs It is found that the degree of difficulty that Parkinson's disease patients had with regular past tenses was closely correlated with the degree of difficulty that they showed in moving the right- hand side of their body. This is because the left- hemisphere areas of the brain that may be required for processing linguistic rules (i.e. Broca's area) are adjacent to the left-hemisphere motor areas, which control movement on the right hand side of the body.

Language Gene: FOXP2 Anthony Monaco, of the University of Oxford in England m/nsu/011004/ htmlhttp:// m/nsu/011004/ html

The bilingual brain English and Mandarin speakers -- appear to use the same parts of their brains to understand a written sentence, regardless of the language used. – 6.htmlhttp:// 6.html

Left & Right Hemispheres Our brain is split: – mlhttp://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/sagittal.ht ml – Test your sidedness: Are you a left or right- sided person? – lhttp://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/rightl.htm l

Split Brain Experiments tmlhttp://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/split.h tml

Mental dictionary Stimulusresponse 1response 2 Actplayplay Applaudlaughcheers Exampleanswersum Healpainmedicine Southwesteast Pool – tool ; crucial – crucible

Mental Lexicon: reading Witchwitch whichno Beansoupbeenno Hourtimeourno EyeeyesIno Hymnbiblehim no Woodwoodwouldno

Mental Lexicon & Brain Naming individuals Naming animals Naming tools Separate & different lesions Unable to recognize sounds, colors, or familiar faces, while having all other perceptual abilities

Specific Language Impairment SLI is a developmental language disorder in the absence of frank neurological, sensori-motor, non-verbal cognitive or social emotional deficits (see Watkins, 1994). One of the hallmarks of SLI is a delay or deficit in the use of function morphemes (e.g., the, a, is) and other grammatical morphology (e.g., plural -s, past tense -ed). Some researchers claim that SLI children's difficulty with grammatical morphology is due to delays or difficulty in acquiring a specific underlying linguistic mechanism. For example, Mabel Rice and Ken Wexler suggest that children with SLI have difficulty acquiring the rule that verbs must be marked for tense and number ("he walks", not "he walk"; Rice, 1994). Have a deficit in processing brief and/or rapidly- changing auditory information, these deficit may underlie difficulties in perceiving grammatical forms (e.g., "the", "is"), which are generally brief in duration (Leonard et al., 1997).

Savants Savant: The autistic savant is one of the most fascinating cognitive phenomena in psychology. "Autistic savant" refers to individuals with autism who have extraordinary skills not exhibited by most persons. Historically, individuals with these exceptional skills were called 'idiot savants’

Savants mathematical calculations, memory feats, artistic abilities, and musical abilities. –A mathematical ability which many autistic individuals display is calendar memory. They could be asked a question like: 'What day of the week was May 22, 1961? and they can determine the answer within seconds--Monday. Others can multiply and divide large numbers in their head and can also calculate square roots and prime numbers without much hesitation. memory feats –remembering everything about presidents (birth/death, term in office, names and birth dates of family members, cabinet members, etc.), –memorizing the U.S. highway system, and remembering everyone's birth date, even after meeting the person once and not seeing him/her for 20 years.

Linguistic Savants Laura –IQ –Her cognitive ability is low, but not linguistic ability –Well-developed phonological, morphological, syntactic, but not lexical and semantic Linguistic Savants: Christopher –IQ –Command several different languages –His linguistic ability is independent of his general conceptual or intellectual ability.

So What? Damage to different parts of the brain leads to impairment of different components of the grammar. (several different levels of grammar: lexicon, phonology, syntax, semantics)

So what? "Grammar" is not an attempt to codify and prescribe how individual languages should be used. Linguists are interested in understanding the Universal Grammar of the human languages: things that all languages share, and the degree to which they vary. Language is a system of the human brain: although it appears to be quite complex, it seems to be very consistent across species: its rules appear to be much more complicated than chess or Scrabble, but it's much easier for humans. Although much is known, many mysteries remain: questions at many levels.