Language and lateralization
Last week
This week
Examples of exam questions
Neuroanatomical questions
Broca's aphasia
Wernicke's aphasia
Relative location of language areas
Early model of language in the brain
Schematic model (oversimplified)
What is speech?
Source-filter model of speech
Speech production
English vowels: formants
PPT Slide
Speech perception is very difficult
Understanding language is even more difficult
Language is hierarchical and can be extremely ambiguous
Willem Levelt's model of speech production and perception
From concept to speech signal
Very complicated transformation take place during speaking
Semantic networks may be used to help think about the associative networks in the brain
Better is it to view concepts as vectors of abstract `features'
Where does language come from?
Universal constraints in thought development
Biological origins of language
What is language?
Grammar may be innate
The essence of grammar is recursion
Creoles and the origins of language
Hatian creole
Selection versus instruction
Conclusion: Not all languages may be equally hard to learn
Where is language located in the brain?
PET data corroborate the lesion data
How can semantic organization be organized according to category?
Semantic organization can emerge on the basis of word context (Ritter and Kohonen, 1990)
Example of a semantotopic map
Lateralization of brain function
There are several ways to investigate brain lateralization
Split brain patients offer important insights into lateralization
Communication between the hemispheres can be investigated
Dichotic listening is a `normal' experimental procedure
Left-brain may attend more to detail, righ-brain more to contour
`Level of detail' may be defined through spatial frequency
Next week...
Email: jaap@murre.com
Home Page: http://www.neuromod.org/courses/public.html
Other information: neuroMod: Home of the Neural and Cognitive Modeling Group at the University of Amsterdam.
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