Summary Language in Mind, An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (Psychology of Language)
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Course
Psychology of Language (800144B6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
This is a complete summary of chapters 1-12 from the book Language in Mind (An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition), written by Julie Sedivy.
-> End: there is a list of important study results
1) Science of language
- Chances are that you find it much easier to produce the right answer than to explain why it is the
right answer (mostly scientific processes), the learn it – use it approach
- Having absolute rights and wrongs as answer on questions minimizes the necessity of thinking (Isaac
Asimov)
- Asimov countered that what matters isn’t knowing whether an idea is right or wrong, but having a
sense of which ideas might be more wrong than others -> with this idea you can come step by step to
a right answer (scientific progression)
- Scientist have another idea/degree of rightness than other people, they look at the likeliness that an
idea is wrong or right and they have the power to evaluate this rightness
1.1) What do scientists know about language?
- Language sciences is about the field ‘’how do you know?’’, it’s very unstable
- Psycholiguistics: a field that uses experimental methods to study the psychological machinery that
drives language learning, language comprehension, and language production/the study of the
psychological factors involved in the perception, production, and acquisition of language
- Theoretical linguists: provide detailed descriptions and analyses of the structure of language. They
pay close attention to the patterns found in languages, examining the intricate constraints that
languages place on how sounds, words, or sentences can be assembled
- Computational linguists: write and implement computer programs to explore the data structure of
human language or to simulate how humans might learn and use language. This approach is
extremely useful for uncovering patterns that require sifting through enormous amounts of data.
- Neurolinguists and cognitive neuroscientists: study the brain and how this complex organ carries out
the mental operations that are required for learning or using language. They investigate the role of
specific regions and networks in the brain, correlate specific brain responses with psychological
operations, and assess the consequences of damage to the brain, all with the aim of understanding
how the brain’s “hardware” is able to run the “software” involved in learning or using language.
- Biolinguists: look deeply into our biological makeup to understand why our species seems to be the
only one to use language to communicate. They are preoccupied with studying genetic variation,
whether between humans and other species, or between specific human populations or individuals.
They try to trace the long explanatory line that links the workings of genes with the structure of the
brain and, ultimately, the mental operations needed to be competent at language.
- Language typologists (like naturalists, collecting data samples from many different modern
languages) and historical linguists (like archeologists, reconstructing extinct ancestors and
establishing the connections and relationships among existing languages): both take a broad view of
language that may help us understand some of the forces at play in shaping language within an
individual’s mind and brain
-> Collaboration across those fields is important because it expands the body of evidence that a
theory is accountable for
- What part of a whole you see is of influence of how you describe/see something
* Example of the elephant (trunk = snake, leg = tree trunk, side = wall)
- Eureka! moments in language research (= peculiar subject matter) represent not discoveries, but
useful in sights into how to begin answering a certain question
* To get answer to those questions you have to be able to probe beneath conscious intuition
(acrobatic feats of imagination and devising ways to go about testing them)
,3) Language and the brain
- Neurolinguists: scientists who study how the physical brain relates to language behavior
- The brain is not made up of clearly sparable parts that are linked together
Brain = essentially a lump of dense tissue made up of interconnected neural cells
- The brain’s functions has a huge variety and complexity
* To understand how a physical object works, you need to have a clear idea of what it does
* The brain has endless tasks, which cause a lot of questions for language scientists
3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain
The case of Pineas Gage
- 1848, the 25-year-old railroad worker was a victim of an accidental explosion that drove an iron rod
into his left cheek and out the top of his head
- After the accident he could chat, and was able to relate the details of the accident, and he survived
years with most of his capacities seemingly intact
- Changes: his personality took a turn for the worse, and he was never able to function as well as he
had before the accident
- Explanation: different parts of the brain play different roles, that’s why some injuries are fatal and
some are not
- But there was not enough evidence, because there was no autopsy and there was no detailed
testing to his personality
- It was widely accepted that the brain regulated movement and the senses in this time—this was
known from the physical evidence of how the nervous system extends from the brain into the body’s
muscles and sensory organs. But it wasn’t even taken for granted that more abstract aspects of the
mind like language or higher intellectual functions—let alone things such as character or
temperament—were under the brain’s command
-> Lesson: in order to make real progress in understanding the brain, an examination of the physical
object of the brain has to proceed in lockstep with some sound thinking about the brain’s job
description
Language at large 3.1, one hundred names for love: Aphasia strikes a literary couple
- When the route to a familiar word was blocked, he was sometimes able to take a neural detour to
unearth another one that would serve his purpose. He struggled with words like blanket or bed, or
his wife’s name, Diane. Nonetheless, he could recruit words like postilion or tardigrades to get an idea
across
Language localization: Broca and Wernicke
- Broca examined a patient by the name of Leborgne who suffered from a brain condition that had
caused him to have seizures from a young age and had left him unable to move one side of his body
and unable to speak—aside from a particular swear word, the syllable tan was the only set of speech
sounds he’d managed to eke out for 21 years -> after he died Broca did an autopsy on his brain
- He discovered extensive damage to the frontal lobe on the left side of Leborgne’s brain, providing
some of the earliest hard evidence of localization in the brain
* Broca argued that the faculty of language was further split into subfunctions
* Leborgne seemed to understand language much better than you’d expect from his utter
lack of ability to speak -> this means he only lost the ability to produce spoken language
- He autopsied more brains of people with the same condition, he found that a significant portion of
them had damage to the same part of the cerebral cortex (the outer covering of the brain’s cerebral
hemispheres/neurons), specifically on the left side of the frontal lobe
- Wernicke on the other hand had a patient who had suffered a stroke and although he was able to
speak fluently, he didn’t seem to understand anything that was said to him
* It was also a brain damage on the left side of the cerebral cortex, but further back (temporal
, lobe) than the region Broca had described (frontal lobe)
- Aphasia: the clinical term for language disruption caused by brain damage
* Broca’s (motor/expressive) aphasia: aphasia characterized by halting speech and
tremendous difficult in choosing words, but fairly good comprehension
* Wernicke’s (sensory/receptive) aphasia: aphasia associated with fluent speech that is well
articulated but often nonsensical, and enormous difficulty in understanding language
Creating brain maps for language
- Brodmann areas: areas of the human cerebral cortex that are distinct from each other anatomically
and in cellular composition as determined by Korbinian Brodmann
* Reasoning: areas that differed in their physical structure were likely to be responsible for
different functions
- Penfield: he used a procedure for electrically stimulating the brain while the patient was conscious.
This stimulation would temporarily disrupt brain function, and the patients’ responses were used to
pinpoint the sites of specific brain functions in individual patients. By carefully recording the results
from many patients, Penfield confirmed that stimulating Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas often caused
problems for language production and comprehension
- Penfield’s studies also showed a surprising amount of variation among individuals, which means
that language-related tasks not just carry out in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (is especially true for
people with damaged brain, functioning parts organize itself to compensate for the damage)
* Subcortical: refers to the internal regions of the cerebral hemispheres, those lying beneath -
the cerebral cortex (place where language-related tasks are also carried out)
-> Dronkers: Some people with damage in Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas but without severe
impairments are observed, and they do not have Broca’s or Wernicke’s aphasia
* But now there are more sophisticated techniques for mapping the brain areas onto
language behavior developed…..
- Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM): a statistical technique in which individual points in a
three-dimensional brain scan image that show evidence of brain damage are correlated with
diminished performance on a behavioral test administered to participants undergoing the brain scans
-> This makes it possible to study a large number of people affected by brain damage in different
areas (big or small), and the technique also allows researchers to break down a general behavior—
such as language comprehension—into performance on more specific aspects of that general
behavior and evaluate how these more specific aspects are related to brain damage in certain areas
- Study by Nina Dronkers
, - Results: Those with damage to the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) had trouble with all of the
sentence types, including the simplest, suggesting that this area is involved in very basic language
comprehension, perhaps at the level of individual words. Those with damage to the anterior portion
of Brodmann’s area 22 (ANT BA22) did fine with the simplest sentences (“The girl is sitting” or “The
girl has a ball”), but performed poorly on sentences that were just a notch more complex, involving
characters whose role in the sentence depends on basic syntactic structure (“The girl is pushing the
boy”). Some areas, such as portions of the Brodmann area 39 (BA39), were most closely connected
with understanding very complex structures (“The girl is not being led by the boy” or “The girl is
kissing the boy that the clown is hugging.”) Interestingly, damage to Wernicke’s area itself, defined as
the posterior (back) portion of Brodmann’s area 22, was not statistically associated with poor
comprehension, and neither was Broca’s area, though neighboring regions were—which further
supported the idea that language functioning is spread around in the brain rather than contained
within these two classic “language” areas
-> Conclusion: the different areas in the brain are linked to processing different types of sentences
Brain lateralization
- Brain lateralization: the specialization of the brain’s right and left cerebral hemispheres for different
functions
- Corpus callosum: a bundle of neural fibers that connects and transfers information between the two
hemispheres of the brain (Roger Sperry & Michael Gazzaniga, 1960s)
- Consequences disconnection two hemispheres (split-brain)
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