10: Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
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When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to:
- Describe several important experimental methods in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics,
- Support claims from theoretical linguistics using experimental evidence, and
- Explain why the field of linguistics is viewed as a part of cognitive science.
In this chapter, we will explore experiments in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics that give us information about the way language works in the human mind. We will show how experimental evidence can support the concepts in linguistic theory introduced in the previous chapters.
- 10.1: The mind makes language
- This page discusses the relationship between linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics within cognitive science. It explains how linguistic elements like phonemes and morphemes are mental representations, with psycholinguistics experimenting to understand language processing in the mind. Neurolinguistics examines the biological basis of language in the brain. The chapter focuses on experiments and methods in these fields to validate linguistic theories and concepts.
- 10.2: Human Language versus Animal Communication
- The page discusses the distinctions between human language and animal communication, emphasizing that while all animals use some form of communication to express basic needs, human language is uniquely capable of expressing complex and abstract ideas. It also highlights ongoing research into animal communication, particularly in primates and dolphins, and the challenges in understanding if their communication systems could evolve to resemble human language.
- 10.3: Evolution of Human Language
- The script from Sarah Harmon's video, "Evolution of Human Language," discusses the complexities surrounding the origins and development of human language. While there are many unanswered questions, several theories have attempted to explain language evolution. These include gestural origins, grooming hypothesis, genetics tied to Universal Grammar, and social cognition.
- 10.4: Evidence for ‘top-down’ effects of word knowledge on perception
- This section explores how a speaker's word knowledge influences their perception of language, complementing previous sections on phonology. Using Ganong's 1980 experiment, it demonstrates the influence of top-down processes in speech perception. When sounds between [d] and [t] are presented within words, listeners bias their perception to create real words, a phenomenon known as the Ganong effect.
- 10.5: Evidence for phonemes as mental categories
- This section discusses how phonological systems, a part of a language's mental grammar, are distinct across languages and how this is supported by psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic evidence. The text references studies using electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to show that the brain processes phonological contrasts early in perceptual processing.
- 10.6: Language Processing in the Brain
- The page discusses neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies on how the brain processes language. It explores how syntactic categories like nouns and verbs are processed differently, as demonstrated by fMRI studies and observations in aphasia patients. Electrophysiological techniques like EEG and ERPs differentiate how the brain processes semantic versus syntactic information, using N400 and P600 responses.
- 10.7: Aphasia
- The page discusses various types of aphasia, a condition affecting speech and language, often resulting from strokes or head trauma. It includes a personal account of the author???s husband who suffers from dysarthria due to a stroke. The text explains different aphasia types, including Broca's (expressive) and Wernicke's (receptive), their symptoms, and challenges. It highlights how aphasia is challenging to overcome fully but can improve with therapy, particularly in younger individuals.
- 10.8: Autonomy of Language
- The text discusses the autonomy of language in the brain, highlighting how language is one of the many complex functions our brain performs. It covers the Critical Age Hypothesis, the potential impacts of neglect on linguistic development, and the distinction between language and intelligence.