10. Linguistic chapter 12 Flashcards
What is neurolinguistics?
The study of the relationship between language and the brain is called neurolinguistics. A construction foreman blasted away rocks to lay a new railway line, some gunpowder accidentally exploded and sent an iron tamping rod up his left cheek and out from on top of his forehead. A month later, he was up and about with no damage to his senses or his speech. Point is, while language may be located in the brain, it clearly is not situated right at the front.
How have we tried to determine where language abilities come from?
We have tried to determine where language abilities for normal users must be by finding areas with specific damage in the brains of people who had identifiable language disabilities.
What is the Broca´s area?
12.1 (Part 1) This specific part of the brain was related to extreme difficulty in producing spoken language and it was noted that damage to the broca´s area in the right hemisphere had no such effect and therefore it was first argued that language ability must be located in the left hemisphere.
Broca’s area is a key component of a complex speech network.
What is the wernicke´s area?
(Part 2) The Wernicke´s area in the brain was found among patients who had speech and written understanding difficulties. This area is close to the auditory cortex that processes what we hear. This confirmed that the left hemispheres is the location of language ability and led to the view that Wernickes area is part of the brain involved in understanding spoken language.
What is the motor cortex and the arcuate fasciculus?
(Part 3) This part is called the motor cortex and this area controls the movement of the muscles for hands, feet and arms and the part of the motor cortex that is close to the Broca´s area controls the articulatory muscles of the face, jaw and tongue, larynx and hence the articulation of speech. (Part 4) is a bundle of nerve fibers called the arcuate fasciculus and is known to form a crucial connection between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas.
What is the vocalization view?
It is tempting to conclude that specific aspects of language ability can be placed in specific locations in the brain and this is called the localization view. It has been used to suggest that the brain activity involved in hearing a word, understanding it, then saying it, would follow a definite pattern. The word is heard/comprehended via Wernicke’s area. The signal is transferred through the arcuate fasciculus to Broca´s area where preparations are made to generate a spoken version of the word and a signal is sent to the motor cortex to physically articulate the word.
What is the tip of the tongue/malapropism phenomena?
Sometimes we feel like some words are just eluding us, when we know the word but it won’t come to the surface. This phenomenon has shown that speakers have an accurate phonological outline of the word, we can get the initial sound correct and know the number of syllables in the word. It suggests that our “word-storage” system may be partially organized on the basis of phonological information and some words are more easily retrieved than others. When we make mistakes, there are often strong phonological similarities. We might say “fire distinguisher” when we mean “fire extinguisher” ; these mistakes are referred to as malapropism.
What is the slip of the tongue phenomenon?
Another type of speech error is described as a slip of the tongue. This produces expressions such as “a long story short” instead of “making a long story short” or “use the door to open the key” when what was meant is “use the key to open the door”.
What is the slips of the brain?
Preservation-anticipation-exchange
There are three general types.
-Preservation is when one sound is carried over to the next word so “My favorite fong” instead of “My favorite song”.
-Anticipation is when a sound is used before its occurrence in the next word so “roman numeral” becomes “nomal numeral”.
-Exchange is when sounds change places so “feel better” becomes “beel fetter”. Although they are treated as errors of articulation they are also slips of the brain as it tries to organize and generate linguistic messages.
What is the slips of the ear phenomena?
The brain also tries to make sense of the auditory signal it receives. For example, in our hearing “great ape” and wondering why someone should be looking for one in his office, but the speaker actually said “gray tape” or “My uncle has a pimple” as “my uncle has a pitbull”. Misunderstanding/mishearing someone singing about a bear called gladly but the person was actually singing a church song “Gladly the cross I’d bear”.
What is aphasia?
Aphasia is defined as an reduction of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding or producing linguistic forms. The most common cause of aphasia is a stroke. Difficulties in understanding can lead to difficulties in production.
What is Broca´s aphasis?
This language disorder is characterized by a substantially reduced amount of speech, distorted articulation and slow, often effortful speech. It often consists of lexical morphemes; nouns, verbs, adj.
Functional morphemes; art, preposition and inflectional morphemes; plural & tense are usually missing. This type of aphasic speech is known as agrammatic speech because the grammatical markers are missing.
What is Wernicke´s aphasia? And what is anomia?
Someone suffering from this disorder can actually produce very fluent speech which is, however, often difficult to understand. “I can’t talk all of the things I do and part I can go alright, but I can’t tell from the other people” The difficulty in finding the corrects word is referred to as anomia. To overcome word-finding difficulties speakers try to describe objects or their purpose “the thing to put cigarettes in” for “ashtray”.
What is conduction Aphasis?
This damage is associated with arcuate fasciculus. Individuals suffering from this disorder sometimes mispronounce words but typically do not have articulation problems. They are fluent but may have disrupted rhythm because of pauses and hesitations. Mispronouncing words like “vaysse” and “fosh” when trying to say “Base” and “wash”. These language disorders are almost always the result of injury to the left hemisphere.
What is Dichotic Listening? Key; experiment
An experiment demonstrated the left hemisphere’s dominance for syllable and word processing. A stroke in the right hemisphere resulted in paralysis of the left leg and therefore the assumption is that a signal coming in the right ear will go to the left hemisphere and vice versa. When a subject has earphones and given two different sound signals simultaneously, one through each earphone. For example one earphone says “dog” and the other simultaneously says “cat” and when asked to say what was said, the subjects more often correctly identifies the sound that came via the right ear; because it went to the left hemisphere directly.
