"One brain, two languages-- educating our bilingual students in the light of Neuroscience“ Dr. Luz Mary Rincon

The human brain

Cerebral Cortex

Reception of spoken and written language

Brain Hemispheres

Cerebral Hemispheres Broca’s area (Paul Broca) Wernicke’s area (Carl Wernicke) Frontal lobe, above the Sylvian fissure Between the parietal and the temporal lobe, below the Sylvian fissure Production of grammatically correct sentences; high level syntactic structures; native intonation Understanding and comprehension of spoken language; comprehension and production of meaning Connected by corpus collusumw

Right hemisphere Processes Creativity, patterns, spatial awareness and context; awareness of second language learning; dominance for procession of intonation (Sheila Humstein) Functions Connected to left side of the body Processes information more diffusely and simultaneously Responsible for relational and mathematical operations Specializes in recognizing places, faces, objects, and nonverbal skills—music, visual, functions, artistic ability Responsible for emotional and social needs; the seat of passion and dreams Responsible for gestures, facial movements, and body language understanding and remembering things we do and see putting bits of information together to make an entire picture

Processes Speech, analysis, time, sequence Functions Responsible for language acquisition and ability to speak languages; Processes information in a linear and sequential manner Responsible for verbal expression, language functions and capacity to use language meaningfully; Responsible for invariable and arithmetic operations; Specializes in recognizing words and numbers; Does logical and analytical thinking; memory for spoken and written messages; detailed analysis of information. Left hemisphere

Aphasias Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... (his own name), and Dad.... er... hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o'clock... and oh... Thursday... ten o'clock, ah doctors... two... an' doctors... and er... teeth... yah I called my mother on the television and did not understand the door. It was too breakfast, but they came from far to near. My mother is not too old for me to be young

Aphasia loss or impairment of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, due to brain damage languagebrain damage

Aphasias Left frontal lobe lesion—Broca’s aphasia Left posterior lobe lesion— Wernicke’s aphasia Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... (his own name), and Dad.... er... hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o'clock... and oh... Thursday... ten o'clock, ah doctors... two... an' doctors... and er... teeth... yah I called my mother on the television and did not understand the door. It was too breakfast, but they came from far to near. My mother is not too old for me to be young

Brain Lateralization Specialization of the functions of each cortical hemisphere as the brain matures Krashen, 1973, lateralization is complete by age five; Lenneberg, 1967, around pubertyñ Scover, 1984), emergence of lateralization at birth, quite evident at five, and completed, only evident, at about puberty. Biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to acquire Critical Age Hypothesis

method used to visualize neurons;eurons it measures changes in blood flow in the brainblood flow fMRI Functional Magnetic Resonance imaging P value probability of a false-positive result equal to or less than

Left Hemisphere: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, central role in language functions

Spatial separation in Broca’s area in late bilinguals

Activity of Wernicke’s area in early bilingual

Activity in Brodman’s 44 in late bilinguals

Activity in Wernicke’s area in late bilinguals

Overlapping in activation of Broca’s area in early bilinguals

First vs second languages and the role of Broca’s area

Cognitive growth is an essential synergy in human development

Higher level cognitive processes Using critical thinking exercises extends the child’s ability to read, think, reason, and process information in a more coherent and clear way The higher the level of thinking, the more abstract and complex the task is

Cognitive skills encompass different types of processes: Classifying Discriminating between real and fantasy/make-believe, between fact and opinion Distinguishing abstract from concrete, true and false Summarizing, outlining

Comparing and contrasting Identifying structure, steps in a process, parts of a story, relationships Identifying main ideas Ordering objects (facts, ideas) Estimating Predicting, inferring