Language Flashcards
Areas surrounding the sylvian fissure
Wernicke’s Area,
Parts of the anterior and lateral temporal lobe
Inferior Parietal Lobe
Inferior Frontal Cortex
Left Perisylvian Language Network
The areas described in the sylvian fissure connected by white matter tracts
Right Superior Temporal Sulcus in language
Plays a role in processing the rhythm of languages
Aphasia
Refers to the collective deficits in language comprehension and production
Dysarthia
Aphasia caused by not a brain lesion but a loss of control over articulatory muscles
Apraxia
Deficits in the motor planning of articulations (you know what you want to say but cannot)
Anomia
A form of aphasia with an inability to name objects
Broca’s Aphasia
Caused by damage to Brodmann Areas 44 and 45, now called Broca’s Area. Difficulty speaking
Story of Broca’s Area
Broca found a lesion in a patient in Broca’s Area and the guy could only say the word ‘tan’.
There was damage to areas around Broca’s Area also so it is not solely responsible
Agrammatic Aphasia
Deficits related to syntax like how sentences are made.
Wernickes Aphasia
(Posterior Aphasia or Receptive Aphasia)
Language or comprehension deficits. Difficulties understanding language including written stuff.
Damage to Wernicke’s area only causes temporary problems, whereas damage or swelling to the areas around Wernickes area cause more problems
Conduction Aphasia
Caused by a disconnection of Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas
Understand words they hear/see and can hear their own speech errors but not correct them. They also have problems producing spontaneous speech as well as repeating speech and sometimes using words incorrectly
How does conductive aphasia happen?
Damage to the large neural fiber tract that connects the two speech areas, the arcuate fasciculus
Mental Lexicon
A store of information about words, including semantic information (meaning), syntactic information (how words form to make a sentence) and the detail of word forms (spellings and sound patterns)
Semantic Paraphasias
Patients with Wernicke’s Aphasia make these errors. For example they may say horse instead of cow
What are the three general functions involved in mental lexicons
Lexical Access
Lexical Selection
Lexical Integration
Lexical Access
The stage of processing where the output of perceptual analysis activates word-form representations (semantic and syntactic attributes)
Lexical Selection
The stage in which identification of the representation that best matches the input is selected
Lexical Integration
The stage in which words are integrated into full sentence or larger context to facilitate the understanding the whole message
Morphemes
The smallest meaningful unit of representation.
In the word ‘defrost’, ‘frost’ is the morpheme as the de can be taken away
Phoneme
a phoneme is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language, (the p in TAP can change it from TAP to TAB)
Besides morphemes and phonemes what two other organizing principles of the mental lexicon exist?!?!
Words that are used more frequently are accessed more quickly than less frequently used words
Represenations in the mental lexicon are organised based on semantic relationships between words
Semantic Dementia
Show impairments in the conceptual system, but other mental and language abilities are spared
For example they have difficulty assigning objects to a semantic category.
They also tend to name a category instead of a specific thing (saying animal instead of pig)
Patients with progressive semantic dementia have damage where
Progressive damage to the temporal lobes, mostly on the left hand side
Patients had difficulty naming specific things (tiger) but not general (living) with damage to what part?
Anterior temporal lobe lesions
From EEG and MEG studies what part of the brain is important for sound perception?
Superior Temporal Cortex
Pure Word deafness
Problems restricted to primarily auditory or phonemic deificts
comprehension of spoken language is grossly disturbed, but the abilities to speak, read, write, and process nonverbal auditory stimuli remain intact.
Hesychl’s Gyri contains the __________ and the surrounding areas are coined the __________
Primary Auditory Cortex
Auditory Association Cortex
The pathway for auditory word recognition
Auditory Cortex
Superior Temporal Gyrus
Middle Temporal Gyrus
Inferior Temporal Gyrus
Angular Gyrus
The Auditory Association Cortex is sensitive to ____
Both speech and non-speech sounds. No distinction is made between these here
Oliver Selfridge Pandemonium Model
A model about how visual stimuli are processed.
Each stage has demons that represent discrete stages of information processing
Different groups of demons work together to process visual stimuli
Image Demon
Records the image that is received in the retina
Feature Demon
Many different types of feature demons that detect a feature, for example, a demon for straight lines, or a demon for curved lines
The vertical line feature demon is used to represent the neurons that respond to the vertical lines in the retina image
Cognitive Demons
Responsible for a specific pattern, such as a letter in the alphabet
Decision Demon
Listens to the yelling of the cognitive demons and selects the loudest cognitive demon which becomes our conscious perception
McClelland and Rumelhart Model
There are three levels of representation.
A feature layer (features of the letters or words)
A letter layer (layer for letters)
A word representation layer
Differences between them
It allows top down information to influence earlier processes and that several letters can be processed at once
Alexia
Inability to read words with no other language deficits
The identification of letters and other symbols takes place where !??!
The Occipitotemporal region in the left hemisphere
Regions here are preferentially activated by letter strings compared to faces.
These regions are called the VISUAL WORD FORM AREA (VWFA)
Reproducible across cultures
Modular Model of language comprehension
Normal language comprehension is executed within separate and independent units.
The flow is bottom up as higher level representations cannot influence lower level ones
Interactive Models
All types of info can participate in word recognition. Context can have its influence even before sensory information is available
Hybrid Models
Lexical access is autonomous and influence by higher level information but that lexical selection may be influence by sensory and higher level contextual informatuon
Syntactic Parsing
A building process that does not rely on retrieval of sentences in the brain but assisgning syntactic structure to words in sentences.
N400 Wave
A brainwave sensitive to semantic aspects of words.\
The wave was higher was sentences ended with an anomalous word (He spread the bread with his SOCK)
In aphasic patients with severe comprehension deficits, the N400 was reduced and delayed.
P600 Response (Syntactic Positive Shift)
Observed about 600ms after words that were incongruous with the expected syntactic structure.
Has to do with grammar and syntactics while the N400 wave is about semantical
A model for language divides it into three components of ____
Memory
Unification
Control
Memory in the language model
Linguistic knowledge which are the building blocks of language
Temporal lobes are involved in this
Unification in the language model
Integration of phonological, semantic and syntactic information into a complete word
THe frontal areas of the brain are involved in this, including the Left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) which includes Broca’s area
Control in the language model
Using language in a social situation. Cognitive control must play a role in this, like the ACC and the dlPFC
