Lecture 9 - The Speaking Brain 2 Flashcards
What is fluent aphasia?
An individual has normal prosody and intonation but don’t coherently make sense - semantically incoherent sentences
What does sensory functional distinction suggest?
Someone can be impaired when noticing animate things - sensory features are impaired but functional features are spared.
Someone can impaired when noticing inanimate things - sensory features are spared but functional features are impaired.
Sensory and functional categories are separate
What is the problem with case studies?
Difficult to prove theory as individuals often VARY
What is the hub and spoke model - Patterson et al 2007
Semantic info is stored in various regions involved in sensory and bodily processes (the spokes), and these connect to a central, amodal semantic system (the hub)
Semantics = amodal and grounded (diff modalities)
Semantic dementia - hub and spoke model
Damage to the hub. Linked to atrophy (decline) of anterior temporal lobes / temporal poles which affects semantic memory
Generalisation across categories and representation of atypical exemplars, regardless of task
Evidence for the hub and spoke model - semantic dementia
Patients with semantic dementia are able to categorise pictures accurately when exemplars are typical (dog as an animal) but not atypical (ostrich as a bird).
May match green with a carrot since most veg are green.
Generalisation across categories and representation of atypical exemplars, regardless of task
The amodal ‘HUB’ - what does it do?
Representation of specific concepts - subordinate categories (robin) irrespective of modality
Categorisation of exceptional concepts (knowing that a radish is a veg even if its atypical)
Generalisation to form categories despite high conceptual feature variability (prawns and scallops as seafood).
Damage to hub = global semantic impairment independent of modality info - struggle to identify a picture of a robin when given name / colours
Distributed, grounded model - SPOKES, what are they?
Semantic representations grounded in sensory and bodily areas - representation of the word robin, sound it calls, colours of a robin
What is a malapropism?
Speech error consists of a word with a similar phonological form to the intended word (historical vs hysterical)
What is a Spoonerism?
Initial consonants swapped ‘you have hissed all my mystery lectures’ or ‘doogle gocs’
What is the role of the anterior part of Broca’s area?
Functions relating to working memory and semantic memory
What is the role of the posterior part of Broca’s area?
Processing increased syntactic complexity
What is a garden path sentence?
Early part biases a syntactic interpretation that turns out to be incorrect ‘The old man the boat’.
