Neurolinguistics
As one of the main brancehs of neuroscience, it studies the neural mechanisms in the human brain controlling comprehension, production, and acquisition(language).
-It studies the brain physically as it relates language production and comprehension.
-It deals with the neurological development of the brain in the language acquisition process,
-Also brings out the effects of brain injuries on language processing.
Many neurolinguistic studies were conducted in parallel with neuroscience.
Linguists try to understand brain and nervous system basically from a cognitive neuroscience perspective.
Neuroscientists seek answer to some questions like;
-how nervous system works,
-how it develops,
-how it malfunctions,
-how it can be altered or repaired.
With a multidisciplinary approach, neurolinguistics also uses neurophysiological techniques to ask questions about the neural implementation of the language such as;
Where are phonemic, semantic, and syntactic representations stored?
Are there brain structures that are innately designated for language?
What kind of neural code is used to concatenate smaller pieces into a larger structure?
What is the wiring between areas that allows different types of information to contribute to disambiguation?
History of Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics came up with the development of Aphasiology in the 19th century.
Aphasiology deals with language impairment and disability resulted from brain damage.
Studies in this field started in 1848. In an accident Phineas Gage, a construction foreman, was injured with a metal rod had gone throug his head. After a month later, he recoved and he did not suffered any speech disorder.
So, It was understood that linguistic abilities were not located...
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...nce organization annually held in United States
International Brain Research Organization (IBRO)
Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS)
Human Genome Project
The BRAIN Initiative (proposed collaborative research to map the activity of every neuron in the human brain)
References http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/genie.htm http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/language_and_the_brain.htm http://www.psypress.com/journals/details/0268-7038/ http://psychology.about.com/od/windex/g/def_wernickesar.htm http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/Neurolinguistics.htm http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-neuro-linguistic-programming.htm http://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/ http://ling.umd.edu/neurolinguistics/ http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-minimalist-program.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience#Major_branches
The two types of aphasia discussed in class is non-fluent aphasia and fluent aphasia. Aphasia can occur when there is damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, which is the language center of the brain. People with non-fluent aphasia will say or sign random words, there will be little or no function words/signs, similar to the telegraphic stage of language development. People with fluent aphasia will be able to produce sentences with function words, but the sentences will contain miss-selected words/signs.
The neuroanatomical approach to aphasia relies on the localization of lesions on the brain in addition to clinical observation in order to classify patients according to syndromes. For example, according to the neuroanatomical approach, Broca’s aphasia, which us usually associated with a lesions on the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the brain, has cardinal features that distinguish is from other fluent and non-fluent aphasias (e.g. poor repetition, poor repetition and poor naming with good auditory comprehension).
The brain receives input and somehow transforms it into output. How does it do it? In part because of the extraordinary technological feats achieved using digital processing computers, the brain has often been interpreted as a symbol manipulator and its cognitive activities as the transformation of symbols according to rules. By contrast, recent successes with parallel distributed processing computers have encouraged a connectionist theory of mind which regards the brain as a pattern recognizer and its cognitive activities as the transformation of neuronal activation patterns; however, these pattern transformations are not rule-governed processes, but straightforwardly causal processes in which networked units (neurons) excite and inhibit each other's activation level.
Webster dictionary defines synaesthesia as “a subjective sensation or image of a sense other than the one being stimulated” (Wyld,1963). Synaesthesia is a condition that causes someone to have associations of usually color with certain everyday things, such as numbers or letters. There are several different types of synaesthesia that will be discussed in this paper digit-color synaesthesia, odor-color synaesthesia, and person- and music-color synaesthesia. A common effect that is discussed when talking about synaesthesia is the McCollough effect. This effect is a wonder of humans and their visual perception where colorless gratings appear to have a color.
Most of the population doesn’t get a certain taste in their mouth when we hear a certain music note and we don’t see certain letters in colors. But for people with forms of synaesthesia, they experience many of these mixing of senses. Typically synaesthesia starts in early childhood and is consistent as the person ages. It is known that the experiences occur with no conscious effort. There are two common forms of synaesthesia, color–graphemic synaesthesia, where specific numbers and letters or words, written and/or spoken, provoking a reaction to seeing different colors. And the second being, color–phonemic synaesthesia, the spoken form. There are reports that state that there are many types of inducers (the stimulus that triggers the synaesthetic experience) and concurrent (the synaesthetic experience itself).
Heilman, K. M. (2002). Chapter 2 Language. In Matter of mind: A neurologist's view of brain-behavior relationships (p. 14). Oxford: Oxford University Press
As discussed in class, my paper is on Neurology Linguistics, or Neurolinguistics. Since I am a psychology major I wanted to incorporate that into my linguistics class. The term Neurolinguistics came from the founder of the Journal of Neurolinguistics, Harry Whitaker. Neurolinguistics is the branch of linguistics associated with the relationship between the functioning of the brain, structure, and language. It is the study of how neural mechanisms in the brain control the comprehension and production of our brain, and the acquisition of language. To find out where our knowledge of language, such as, speech, writing, reading, and interpreting information is stored in the brain, we need to know parts of the brain.
This paper involves how the brain and neurons works. The target is to display the brain and neurons behavior by sending signals. The nervous system that sends it like a text message. This becomes clear on how we exam in the brain. The techniques show how the brain create in order for the nerves about 100 billion cells. Neurons in the brain may be the only fractions of an inch in length. How powerful the brain could be while controlling everything around in. When it’s sending it signals to different places, and the neurons have three types: afferent neurons, efferent neurons, and the interneurons. In humans we see the old part of emotions which we create memories plus our brain controls heart beating, and breathing. The cortex helps us do outside of the brain touch, feel, smell, and see. It’s also our human thinking cap which we plan our day or when we have to do something that particular day. Our neurons are like pin head. It’s important that we know how our brain and neurons play a big part in our body. There the one’s that control our motions, the way we see things. Each neuron has a job to communicate with other neurons by the brain working network among each cell. Neurons are almost like a forest where they sending chemical signals. Neurons link up but they don’t actually touch each other. The synapses separates there branches. They released 50 different neurons.
As the human body goes through different experiences, the brain grows, develops, and changes according to the environmental situations it has been exposed to. Some of these factors include drugs, stress, hormones, diets, and sensory stimuli. [1] Neuroplasticity can be defined as the ability of the nervous system to respond to natural and abnormal stimuli experienced by the human body. The nervous system then reorganizes the brain’s structure and changes some of its function to theoretically repair itself by forming new neurons. [2] Neuroplasticity can occur during and in response to many different situations that occur throughout life. Some examples of these situations are learning, diseases, and going through therapy after an injury.
The first stage is known as Encoding, which is how the memories are formed. Encoding requires selective attention to the material to be encoded (Intelegen Inc.). All the messages are registered but only the meaningful ones are put into memory. There are different types of encoding. Structural Encoding is the first; it keeps emphasis on the physical structural characteristics, also known as the shallow level. Phonemic Encoding is the second; it keeps the emphasis on the sounds of words, the intermediate level. ...
My love for neuroscience began long before my passion for neuroscience research. My favorite aspect of psychology since my initial encounter in Advanced Placement Psychology in high school is the nervous system and brain function in relation to behavior. It is fascinating how something so small serves such an extremely important and vital role in our body and behavior. The intriguing details of the brain fuel my desire to learn more about its functions. After completing the Biological Basis of Behavior and Neural System Courses at the University of Maryland, my knowledge as well as curiosity for the brain heightened.
Throughout the course of history many people in time had no idea that many creatures of life had brains. With remarkable breakthroughs in technology and through human ability to take pictures of the human brain through head scans, scientists have discovered and mapped out the human brain. As neuroscientists understand how the brain works, discovery of brain-based learning has been a growing field ever since. Education is extremely important for human beings because the more educated we are as a society the better we contribute to society. Knowledge is extremely powerful and as a future educator, understanding how the brain works and developing lesson plans surrounding the inner workings of the brain will allow learning to manifest in the classroom.
Early studies in this field were established by the end of the 1960s. The major focus of the studies was on the comprehension and production of the words. Most of the studies were oriented to psychology. The introduction of this concept into linguistics shifted the attention to the phonological, semantic, and syntactic representations in the mind. Aitchison (1994) described mental lexicon as the permanent human dictionary in which words and their meanings are stored in the brain. On the other hand, Richards (2000) described mental lexicon as the organized mental representations of the concepts and knowledge which are related to the words. There are three scopes of word knowledge; phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was developed in the 1970s by a linguist John Grinder and by a mathematician Richard Bandler. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a therapy that deals with one’s perceptions of the world by their experiences, beliefs, values, assumptions, and sensory systems. NLP was developed by studying and examining the modeling pattern of human internal and external behaviors of the world. According to NLP website, “NLP investigates the inner functions of the human mind: how we think, how we develop our desires, goals and fears and how we motivate ourselves, make connections, and give meaning to our experiences” (NLP Comprehensive, 2013). NLP entails various collections of psychological practices that target to improve peoples’ lives. Mainly, it is a therapy of motivating the conscious mind by acting upon the unconscious mind; the experience is subjective to the person.
It is thus concerned with brain cells, brain structures and components, brain chemistry, and how all this leads to speech and action. It is also important to understand how we take in information from our five senses.