Language & the Brain

Question 1

What is aphasia?

Answer 1

uneven patterns of language behaviour following brain damage

Question 2

What impairments do people with Broca’s (expressive) aphasia face?

Answer 2

they understand but can’t produce language (orally or written) → lost ability to express grammatical relationships

Question 3

What impairments do people with Wernicke’s (receptive) aphasia face?

Answer 3

they produce nonsensical language → unable to produce paragrammatic speech

Question 4

Broca’s aphasics have impairments in expressing ____ gestures

Answer 4

interactive

Question 5

Wernicke’s aphasics have impairments in expressing ____ gestures

Answer 5

referential

those referring to an aspect of the conversation’s content

Question 6

What impairment do people with conductive aphasia face?

Answer 6

they are able to understand and produce speech but can’t repeat what’s heard

Question 7

What is pure word deafness?

Answer 7

patients are unable to comprehend language auditorily, although they are still capable of comprehending visual language and producing language in either modality

(due to damaged auditory nerve & loss of corpus callosum)

Question 8

Describe how Geschwind’s Model of Language Processing describes the path that visual input follows to reach the brain

Answer 8

starting at visual regions > angular gyrus > Wernicke’s area (meaning) > Broca’s area (motor commands) via arcuate fasciculus > speech muscles

If only the arcuate fasciculus is damaged, it results in conduction aphasia

Question 9

Broca’s aphasics were believed to lack syntactical knowledge. What evidence disproved this belief?

Answer 9

Broca’s patients are unable to activate words quickly enough to use them in normal comprehension. Even though they show automatic spreading activation similar to that of individuals without brain damage, it is slower than normal

Question 10

What is functional lateralisation?

Answer 10

the tendency for a given psychological function to be served by one hemisphere

Question 11

The right hemisphere uses ____ processing, which involves the activation of ____, while
The left hemisphere uses ____ processing, involving the activation of ____

Answer 11

holistic, a single mental representation of a stimulus

relational, at least two distinct representations that are related to each other

Question 12

Saygın et al. (2004) examined aphasic patients’ comprehension of visually presented action stimuli in both linguistic and non-linguistic domains. What did they find?

Answer 12

Aphasia impairs linguistic (more pronounced) & non-linguistic task performance which correlates with aphasia severity. However, there is no correlation between linguistic & non-linguistic task performance (perhaps this holds only for severe aphasics)

Question 13

Which language processes did Saygın et al. (2004) find were particularly impaired in aphasics?

Answer 13

conceptual/semantic processes

Question 14

How is auditory language lateralised (Gurunandan et al., 2020)?

Answer 14

it is bilateral

Question 15

How is language production lateralised (Gurunandan et al., 2020)?

Answer 15

it is exclusively left lateralised

Question 16

How is does learning a non-native language affect language production lateralisation (Gurunandan et al., 2020)?

Answer 16

it has no effect - it is and remains left lateralised

Question 17

how does increased non-native language profficiency influence lateralisation for reading comprehension, speech comprehension, and language production (Gurunandan et al., 2020)?

Answer 17

lateralisation converges (increases) for reading comprehension & speech comprehension, and
diverges (decreases) for comprehension and production

Question 18

Increasing non-native language profficiency ____ lateralisation for ____ and ____ , but not for ____ which remaines left lateralised (Gurunandan et al., 2020)

Answer 18

increases
reading
speech comprehension
speech production

Question 19

What is the role of the right hemisphere in language according to the fMRI study by Sollmann et al. (2014)?

Answer 19

it integrates, contextualises, and infers meaning from language

Question 20

Sollmann et al. (2014) found right hemisphere cortical regions causally related to single-word production. What other regions did they find?

Answer 20

Male- and female-specific language regions, speech-motor control regions, and cortical regions supporting language task performance

Question 21

Which three functional groups can the right hemisphere language regions be divided into (Sollmann et al., 2014)?

Answer 21

the no-response-dominant group (trIFG, MTG, anG), the performance-error-dominant group (opIFG, STG), and the hesitation-error-dominant group (MFG, SMG)

Question 22

What are the 4 features of the language network named by Malik-Moraleda et al. (2022)?

Answer 22

1. its location with respect to other systems — perceptual, cognitive and motor—systems;
2. lateralisation to the LH (in most individuals)
3. strong functional integration among the different components
4. selectivity for linguistic processing

Question 23

Why did Malik-Moraleda et al. (2022) use the longer naturalistic cognition paradigms in addition to the language localiser tasks?

Answer 23

to examine functional connectivity between regions - these tasks would locate synchronous vs. asynchronous activity among brain regions

Question 24

What conclusion can be drawn from the following graph(Malik-Moraleda et al., 2022)?

Answer 24

That there is a modest but identical similarity in language region brain activity between speakers of different languages and speakers of the same language