Chapter 13 Neurolinguistics

Question 1

How many nerve cells in the brain

Answer 1

10 billion nerve cells, or neurons, arranged in complex networks. Each cell can be directly linked with up to 10,000 others.

Question 2

“lower” brains structures (close to spinal cord)

Answer 2

shared by almost all animals.

maintain functions such as respiration, heart rate, and muscle coordination.

Question 3

cortex (outermost layer)

Answer 3

This structure is absent in reptiles and amphibians, and makes up a higher proportion of the brain in primates and their closer evolutionary relatives than it does in other mammals.
folded in on itself, which increases its surface area.

Question 4

what is a sulcus (plural: sulci)

Answer 4

The inward part of a cortical fold

Question 5

what is a gyrus (plural: gyri).

Answer 5

the outward part of a cortical fold

Question 6

what are fissures

Answer 6

Deep sulci.
The longitudinal fissure separates the
cerebral hemispheres.

Question 7

what is the corpus callosum

Answer 7

A bundle of nerve fibres, the connection between the cerebral hemispheres

Question 8

cerebral hemispheres

Answer 8

two sides of the brain, the left and right cerebral hemispheres are anatomically and functionally separate
control contralateral functions of the body, i.e. those on the opposite side

Question 9

left cerebral hemisphere

Answer 9

controls analytic abilities, such as arithmetic. is primarily responsible for language

Question 10

Right cerebral hemisphere

Answer 10

controls more holistic tasks, such as recognition of faces and melodies

Question 11

Right-handed people

Answer 11

Most right-handed people are left-lateralized for language.

Question 12

Right-handed people- left hemisphere removed

Answer 12

• If their left hemisphere is surgically removed (for example, to treat severe epilepsy), they typically cannot process complex syntactic patterns, but retain some comprehension ability.

Question 13

Right handed people- right hemisphere removed

Answer 13

• If their right hemisphere is surgically removed, they have difficulty understanding jokes and metaphors (like He was wearing a loud tie).

Question 14

Left handed people

Answer 14

tend to be less lateralized for language.

Question 15

lobes

Answer 15

hemispheres are further divided into

lobes.

Question 16

where is the central sulcus

Answer 16

behind the frontal lobe and in front of the parietal lobe.

Question 17

where is the Sylvian fissure

Answer 17

above the temporal lobe, separates it from the frontal/parietal lobes

Question 18

occipital lobe

Answer 18

not separated by a fissure, but falls behind the parietal lobe

Question 19

4 lobes of the brain

Answer 19

Frontal lobe (at the front), Temporal lobe (at the bottom), occipital lobe (at the back), Parietal lobe (at the top)

Question 20

autopsy

Answer 20

a traditional technique for studying the areas of the brain involved in different language disorders
Careful observations of a living patient’s behaviour are recorded; after death, damage to the brain is examined

Question 21

Computerized axial tomography (CT scanning)

Answer 21

uses X-rays to provide a 3D static image of the brain, identifying lesions and tumours.

Question 22

Positron emission tomography (PET)

Answer 22

uses a radioactive tracer to track glucose absorption in the brain, which is higher in areas of activity.

Question 23

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Answer 23

uses a powerful (and expensive!) magnet to measure blood deoxygenation, with no radioactive tracer.

Question 24

Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

Answer 24

uses sensors to measure tiny magnetic fields on the surface of the scalp. non-invasive and has the same temporal resolution as ERP.
better spatial resolution, since magnetic fields do not extend as far from their source as electrical potentials do

Question 25

What part of the brain is active during speaking?

Answer 25

Broca’s area

Question 26

What part of the brain is active during reading?

Answer 26

occipital lobe and the angular gyrus

Question 27

dichotic listening study

Answer 27

Another neurolinguistic technique in which different auditory stimuli are presented to each ear.

Question 28

right ear advantage

Answer 28

arises for words, numbers, and Morse code, because of the more direct connection with the left hemisphere.

Question 29

left ear

Answer 29

shows an advantage for melodies and environmental sounds such as birdsong

Question 30

Split-brain experiments

Answer 30

after the corpus callosum is severed, demonstrate that the right hemisphere is mute.
a blindfolded split-brain patient can name an object placed in their right hand, but not in their left

Question 31

Aphasia

Answer 31

loss of language ability resulting from brain damage. Usually from a stroke can also occur from blows to the head, brain infection, brain tumours, and brain hemorrhage

Question 32

Aphasia stats

Answer 32

affects more than 1 million people in North America; it is equally common in men and women, and most likely to occur after age 50

Question 33

Non-fluent (or motor) aphasia

Answer 33

arises from damage to the frontal lobe. The most severe type is called global aphasia, which results in muteness.

Question 34

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 34

resulting from damage to the lower posterior (rear) portion of the left frontal lobe, called Broca’s area.

Question 35

Broca’s aphasia results in what kind of speech?

Answer 35

speech of Broca’s aphasics is halting, with many periods of silence, dysprosody (the absence of normal sentence intonation), and phonemic paraphasias
… har eat … wit … pun
‘It’s hard to eat with a spoon.’
tend to omit function words, yielding telegraphic speech. also tend to omit inflectional affixes

Question 36

Broca’s aphasia grammar

Answer 36

Broca’s aphasics have difficulty judging the grammaticality of sentences with syntactic errors
Examples: The boy ate it up. 
*Boy ate it up.
*The boy ate up it.
The boy ate up the cake.

Question 37

Broca’s aphasia passives

Answer 37

have difficulty interpreting passives correctly, when pragmatic (real-world) knowledge fails to identify the correct interpretation
Examples:
 The mouse was chased by the cat.
 The dog was chased by the cat. 
The cat was chased by the mouse.

Question 38

Broca’s aphasia semantics

Answer 38

does not seem to be involved in the semantic relationships between words, or in the relationship between language and thought. typically aware of their language deficit.

Question 39

fluent (or sensory) aphasia

Answer 39

no difficulty in producing language, but the content of what is produced is disordered. most important type of fluent aphasia is Wernicke’s aphasia

Question 40

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 40

resulting from damage to the upper posterior portion of the left temporal lobe, called Wernicke’s area
speech typically sounds fine, no long pauses, correct intonation, use of function words, and correct word order. But makes very little sense

Question 41

Jargon aphasia

Answer 41

severe form of Wernicke’s aphasia in which phonemes are randomly selected. Speech has correct intonation, but few recognizable words

Question 42

Wernicke’s aphasia patients..

Answer 42

lack coherent trains of thought
have difficulty doing sequenced tasks such as buying groceries or doing laundry
typically unaware of their disorder

Question 43

acquired dyslexia

Answer 43

The impairment of reading ability following

brain damage

Question 44

acquired dysgraphia

Answer 44

The impairment of writing ability following brain damage

Question 45

paragraphia

Answer 45

error in writing that often omits the letters corresponding to sounds they would omit (Broca’s aphasiacs do this)

Question 46

Broca’s aphasia patients (writing)..

Answer 46

make paragraphia errors
also omit function words and inflectional morphology in spontaneous writing
have good silent reading skills, but their reading aloud is telegraphic
These errors suggest a deep deficit, not just an articulatory one

Question 47

Wernicke’s aphasics (writing)..

Answer 47

typically retain good spelling and handwriting, but what they write makes little sense
Their reading comprehension is severely impaired as well

Question 48

damage to angular gyrus

Answer 48

Acquired reading and writing deficits also occur on their own, usually following damage in and around the angular gyrus

Question 49

English orthography requires..

Answer 49

both knowledge of spelling-to-sound rules (for regular spellings like bat) and recognition of whole words (for irregular spellings like yacht)

Question 50

phonological dyslexia

Answer 50

patients lose the ability to use the spelling-to-sound rules; they can only read familiar words
Given a nonsense word like blug, they either cannot read it, or produce a similar real word (blue, bug)

Question 51

surface dyslexia

Answer 51

patients lose the ability to recognize whole words
• They overregularize the pronunciation of irregular spellings (e.g. yacht → /jɑtʃt/).
• They comprehend a word like worm as they pronounce it (“warm”), not as it is spelled.

Question 52

Aphasia and linguistic theory

Answer 52

Incorporating linguistic theory has radically increased the sophistication of the research questions posed in studies of aphasia.
This has yielded a deeper understanding of aphasic phenomena.

Question 53

Evidence that inflection and derivation are distinct

Answer 53

Broca’s aphasics tend to drop inflectional morphology, but preserve derivational morphology

Question 54

deep dyslexia (evidence for a semantic organization of the lexicon)

Answer 54

patients will produce a word that is semantically related to a word they are asked to read (e.g. mother → ‘father’).
provides independent evidence for a semantic organization of the lexicon

Question 55

evidence for rules and linguistic competence

Answer 55

Broca’s aphasics will produce the unrestricted form of a morpheme, rather than the allomorph resulting from the application of a rule (e.g. illegal → ‘inlegal’)

Question 56

agrammatism

Answer 56

Happens in Broca’s aphasia, the absence of certain key grammatical abilities
words typically omitted by Broca’s aphasics are items such as it, is, to, or a
provides evidence between functional categories and lexical categories

Question 57

default strategy for Broca’s aphasics’ difficulty with passives

Answer 57

treats the first NP in a sentence as an agent. This works with active sentences, but not with passives.
Broca’s aphasics typically guess at the meaning of reversible passives (like The cat was chased by the dog)—incorrectly about 50% of the time, not 100%.
(evidence against default strategy)

Question 58

Various aspects of language represented in different parts of the brain:

Answer 58

• Broca’s area plays a crucial role in speech articulation and syntax.
• Wernicke’s area plays a key role in language comprehension.
• The angular gyrus plays a special role in reading.