Chapter 12 Language and the Brain

1 Neurolinguistics

Def: the study of the relationship between language and the brain

2 Language Areas in the Brain

The shaded areas in the picture indicate the general locations of those language functions involved in speaking and listening

Broca’s Area

Def: a part of the brain in the left hemisphere involved in speech production

Wernicke’s Area

Def: a part of the brain in the left hemisphere involved in language comprehension

The Motor Cortex and the Arcuate Fasciculus

Def: 

• Motor Cortex: a part of the brain that controls muscle movement

• Arcuate fasciculus: a bundle of nerve fibers connecting Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the left hemisphere of the brain

The Localization View

Def: the belief that specific aspects of linguistic ability have specific locations in the brain 

3 Tongue Tips and Slips 

tip of the tongue phenomenon:

The experience of knowing a word, but being unable to access it and bring it to the surface in order to say it

Studied this phenomenon have show speaker phonological outline of word and the number of syllables in the word and get the initial sound correct. 

When we make mistakes in this retrieval process, there are often strong phonological similarities between the target word we are trying to say and the mistake we produce it call melapropism 

malapropism:

a speech error in which one word is used instead of another with a similar beginning, end and number of syllables (e.g. medication used instead of “meditation”)

Slips of the Tongue

Def: a speech error in which a sound or word is produced in the wrong place, as in black bloxes (instead of “black boxes”)

It produces expressions such as: a long shory stort or  a long shory stort 

Slip of this type are called spoonerisms

spoonerism:

A slip of the tongue in which two parts of words or two words are switched, as in a dog of bag food (for “a bag of dog food”)

Slips of the Brain

There are three general types

• Perseveration:

A type of slip of the tongue in which a sound carries over from one word to the following word(s), as in black bloxes (“black boxes”) 

• Anticipation:

A type of slip of the tongue in which a sound is used in a word in anticipation of that sound in a following word, as in a tup of tea (“cup of tea”)

• Exchange:

A type of slip of the tongue in which sounds in two words are switched, as in you’ll soon beel fetter (“feel better”)

Slips of the Ear

Def: a processing error in which one word or phrase is heard as another, as in hearing great ape when the utterance was “gray tape”

4 Aphasia

Def: an impairment of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding and/or producing language

Broca’s Aphasia

Def: a language disorder in which speech production is typically reduced, distorted, slow and missing grammatical markers

Broca’s Aphasia led to the characterization of lacking grammatical forms, or “agrammatic.” In agrammatic speech, the grammatical markers are missing.

Agrammatic speech: the type of speech without grammatical markers, often associated with Broca’s aphasia

E.g: when you ask whose aphasia was not severe is the

following answer to a question regarding what the speaker had for breakfast:

“I eggs and eat and drink coffee breakfast”

Wernicke’s Aphasia

Def: a language disorder in which comprehension is typically slow while speech is fluent, but vague and missing content words

E.g:

 “I can’t talk all of the things I do, and part of the part I can go alright, but I can’t tell from the other people” 

Difficulty in finding the correct word, sometimes referred to as anomia, also happens in Wernicke’s aphasia

anomia:

A language disorder in which it is difficult to find words, often associated with Wernicke’s aphasia

Conduction Aphasia

Def: A language disorder associated with damage to the arcuate fasciculus in which repeating words or phrases is difficult 

5 Dichotic Listening

Def: an experiment in which a listener hears two different sounds simultaneously, each through a different earphone

The dichotic listening test has provided the face that anything experienced on the right-hand side of the body is processed in

the left hemisphere, and anything on the left side is processed in the right hemisphere

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Left Brain, Right Brain

In this process, the language signal received through the left ear is first sent to the right hemisphere and then has to be sent to the left hemisphere (language center) for processing and it take more time than received through the right ear which called the right-ear advantage.

right-ear advantage:

the fact that humans typically hear speech sounds more readily via the right ear

In contrast, the right hemisphere is better at non-language tasks. In dichotic listening tests, non-verbal sounds are recognized better from the left ear, indicating faster processing in the right hemisphere.

6 The Critical Period

The apparent specialization of the left hemisphere for language is usually described in terms of lateral dominance or

lateralization (one-sidedness)

Lateralization (lateralized):

Divided into a left side and a right side, with control of functions on one side or the other (used in describing the human brain)

During childhood, there is a period when the human

brain is most ready to receive input and learn a particular language it is called the critical period 

Critical period:

The time from birth to puberty during which normal first language acquisition can take place

Genie

In 1970 there was the girl people called Genie she grown up in isolation, lacked of language but later developed the communication skills. This suggests language learning may be possible beyond a critical period, though complexity might be limited. Interestingly, Genie's language processing seemed to occur in her right brain, challenging the idea of a single dominant language area