What is Neurolinguistics?
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Neurolinguistics
is the study of the biological and neural foundations of language.
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The
research is often based on data from atypical or impaired language and uses
such data to understand properties of human language in general.
The brain
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A
brain composed of right hemisphere and left hemisphere, and connected
by corpus callosum.
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They
operate contralaterally.
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The
surface of the brain is called cortex. It is often called as “gray
matter” and/or the “decision-making”.
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Somewhere
in the cortex, the grammar is resided to represent our knowledge of language.
Localization
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Proposed
by Franz Joseph Gall, in the early nineteenth.
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It
is the idea that different cognitive abilities and behaviors are localized in
specifics parts of the brain.
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The
Gall’s view has been upheld by scientific investigation of brain disorder.
Broca’s aphasia
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Language
disorder caused by the injuries to Broca’s area.
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Broca’s
area is localized to the front part of the left hemisphere.
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The
aphasia is characterized by labored speech, word-finding difficulties,
and agrammatic speech, it affects a person’s ability to form sentences
with the rules of syntax.
Aphasia
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Language
disorder that results from brain damage caused by disease or trauma.
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There
are two kinds of aphasia, those are Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s
aphasia.
•
It
based on the lateralization of language proposed by a French surgeon, Paul
Broca (1860) and a German neurologist, Carl Wernicke (1870s).
Wernicke’s aphasia
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Language
disorder caused by the injuries to Wernicke’s area.
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Broca’s
area is localized to the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere.
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The
aphasia is characterized by semantically incoherent speech, difficulty
naming objects, and lexical errors.
Other forms of aphasia
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The
kind of aphasia related to reading is called dyslexia. There are two kinds of dyslexia, those
are developmental dyslexics and acquired
dyslexics
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Another
form is anomia, a severe TOT (tip-of-the-tongue).
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For
deaf signers, the aphasia affects the producing of the sign, even though sign
language is a visual language.
Evidences of lateralization
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Dichotic
listening, an experimental technique that uses auditory signals to observe the
behavior of human’s hemisphere.
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Brain
imaging technology that can reveal lesions in the living brain, such as CT
scan, MRI, PET scan, etc.
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ERPs
(event-related brain potentials) measuring technology.
Critical-age hypothesis
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Assumes
that language is biologically based and that the ability to learn a native
language develops within a fixed period, from birth to middle childhood.
source : Indah Lestari
(source: Fromkin, Intr. to language)
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