Neurolinguistics Workshop

Neurolinguistics

Joel E. Acosta

March, 27th 2012

Agenda:

1. Definition: What is Neurolinguistics about?

2. History

3. Aphasia and Dyslexia

4. Human Brain Organization

5. Where is the language in the brain?

6. Linguistic Components and Neurolinguistics

1. What is Neurolinguistics about?

Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.

Neurolinguistics is a branch of linguistics dealing mainly with the biological basis of the relationship of the human language and brain.

2. History

Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain damage.

One of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe

Broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship, and has been described as "epoch-making” and "pivotal” to the fields of neurolinguistics and cognitive science.

Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks, with Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's area handling auditory speech comprehension.

The work of Broca and Wernicke established the field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied through examining physical characteristics of the brain.

Early work in aphasiology also benefited from the early twentieth-century work of Korbinian Brodmann, who "mapped" the surface of the brain, dividing it up into numbered areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell structure) and function; these areas, known as Brodmann areas, are still widely used in neuroscience today.

The coining of the term "neurolinguistics" has been attributed to Harry Whitaker, who founded the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985.

3. Aphasia and Dyslexia

Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder that impairs a person's ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence. Aphasia impairs the ability to speak and understand others, and most people with aphasia experience difficulty reading and writing.

Dyslexia is an inherited language-based learning disability caused by a neurologically-based disorder. Dyslexia can interfere with a person's ability to process language. This difficulty with language skills would be emphasized mostly in reading, pronouncing words, writing, spelling, handwriting and sometimes arithmetic within a person's life. This often occurs due to problems in phonological processing, expressive language, and receptive language.

4. Human Brain Organization

The organization of your brain is similar to other people because we almost all move, hear, and see, and so on in essentially the same way. But our individual experiences and training also affect the organization of our brains—for example, deaf people understand sign language using just about the same parts of their brains that hearing people do for spoken language.

5. Where is the language in the brain?

We can't say that all of language is 'in' a particular part of the brain; it's

not even true that a particular word is 'in' just one spot in a person's brain.

But we can say that listening, understanding, talking, and reading each

involve activities in certain parts of the brain much more than other parts.

Most of these parts are in the left side of your brain, the left hemisphere,

regardless of what language you read and how it is written. We know this

because aphasia (language loss due to brain damage) is almost always

due to left hemisphere injury in people who speak and read Hebrew,

English, Chinese, or Japanese, and also in people who are illiterate. But

areas in the right side are essential for communicating effectively and for

understanding the point of what people are saying. If you are bilingual,

your right hemisphere may be somewhat more involved in your second

language than it is in your first language.

6. Linguistic Components and Neurolinguistics

Linguistic Components

DescriptionRelationship between the component and the

Neurolinguistics

Phonetics the study of speech soundshow the brain extracts speech sounds from an acoustic signal, how the brain separates speech sounds from background noise

Phonologythe study of how sounds are organized in a language

how the phonological system of a particular language is represented in the brain

Morphology and lexicology

the study of how words are structured and stored in the mental lexicon

how the brain stores and accesses words that a person knows

Syntaxthe study of how multiple-word utterances are constructed how the brain combines words into constituents and sentences;

how structural and semantic information is used in understanding sentences

Semanticsthe study of how meaning is encoded in language

7. Practice

1. Work in pairs

2. Answer the following questions:

a. What is Neurolinguistics?

b. Are all human brians organized in the same way? Try to explain it?

c. Where is the language in the brain?

3. Complete the following chart

4. After work in pairs share our ideas about.

Linguistic Components

DescriptionRelationship between the component and the

Neurolinguistics

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology and lexicology

Syntax

Semantics

Sources

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/342418/linguistics/35125/Other-areas-of-research?anchor=ref411920

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolinguistics

http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-neuro.cfm

http://sskkii.gu.se/eliza/Home%20page%20NL/NL1-2-3x.ppt.pdf