Chapter 12 Language and Brain
12.1 Introduction
In the past: more concern for language instead of the brain, due to difficulties in study
Recently: technological advances facilitated the study
Two sub-branches: neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics

12.2 Neurolinguistics
1) What is neurolinguistics ?
Definition: Neurolinguistics is the study of the relationship between brain and language.
Scope: how the structure of the brain influences language learning
how and where in the brain language is stored
how damage to the brain affects the ability to use language
  Development: in its infancy 起步阶段
2）The structure and function of the human brain
 brain:　ten billion nerve cells (neurons神经元)-basic information processing unit
        billions of fibers connecting these neurons (纤维)
  two sections of the brain:
lower section (brain stem 脑干)-in all animals: maintaining essential functions like respiration, heart rate, muscle co-ordination
  higher section (cerebrum 大脑)-different in different species 
cortex:  脑皮层：formed by neurons, decision-making organ and storehouse of memory , where the language representation and processing take place, peculiar to human beings, not existent in animals
  two parts of the cortex:　(separated by longitudinal fissure纵裂)
the left cerebral hemisphere ( left brain) -excels in analytic tasks, such as arithmetic   
the right cerebral hemisphere ( right brain) -excels in overall appreciation of complex patterns, such as recognizing familiar faces and melodies
language -not always by one hemisphere, but coordinated functioning of both
  connected by corpus callosum (胼胝体)（a bundle of nerve fibres）(a pathway to the other) 
  each hemisphere controls the opposite half of the body in muscle movement
and sensation , e.g  scratching nose with right hand-controlled by the left brain ; whispering to the left ear-sounds signals go the right brain, then to the left
  right--handed persons: language representation in the left brain---left lateralized for language语言的左脑侧化
not every aspect of language in the left: when left brain surgically removed, speech and ability to process complex syntactic patters are lost, while some language comprehension ability is retained (must controlled by the right brain).
  left-handed: more complex, few have language localization in the right brain, usually in both, hence generally less lateralized for language.
3) Methods in the study of the brain and evidence for lateralization
 There is some lateralization of function.
 Methods: traditional : autopsy 尸体解剖　at present :two categories:
investigation of the brain itself---SAT阿米妥纳试验, CT scanning ,
PET 计算机辅助正电子发射垫层扫描技术
examination of the behavior associated with the brain-dichotic listening studies双耳分听试验, split brain studies 裂脑试验
  Autopsy studies: Broca's area: 布罗卡区-Broca (19th century French 　　　　　　　　　nerologist) examined a patient's brain after his death, who could not speak for twenty years but could understand everything said to him. Broca found severe damage (lesion 毁损) in the lower rear area of the left frontal lobe （大脑左前不突出部位的后下方）and concluded this part responsible for speech production.
  Methods to study the brain:
SAT: sodium amytal is injected into an artery carrying blood to one side of the brain(大脑一侧的输血动脉), patient is asked to count out aloud at the same time. If this side/ hemisphere is responsible for speech, the patient can not go on counting and experiences severe language difficulties for several minutes. If not, patient can go no normal counting almost immediately after the injection. The method is effective, but risky.
CT scanning: a narrow beam of X-ray is used to create brain images, in the form of a series of brain slices. It is useful in identifying brain lesions (damage) and tumour肿瘤， but the image is static.
PET: possible to study the brain in action. It is found that when a person speaks, much blood flows to the left brain and Broca's area in particular; when a person reads, blood flows to the occipital lobe枕骨突出部位, to the angular gyrus角脑回, and other areas in the left brain. Therefore, the left brain is primarily responsible for language and there are specific language areas within it.
  Methods to examine the behaviors associated with the brain
Dichotic listening:　linguistic / non-linguistic stimuli are given through headphones to the left and right ears to determine the lateralization of various cognitive functions. Results: If given two different words/ sounds, most subjects can report the word played to right ear more accurately. If given different tunes, it is the left ear. Conclusion: left hemisphere is better at processing linguistic signals, like words, numbers while the right hemisphere is better at melodies and environmental sounds, like bird songs. The right ear shows an advantage for the perception of linguistic signals----called right ear advantage (REA)
Split brain studies: Corpus callosum (胼胝体)connects the two hemispheres. If it is damaged, the hemisphere can not communicate with the other. The studies of effects of surgically removed corpus collosum on cognition----called split brain studies. Result: right brains of split brain patients are mute, though they show some language understanding. If an apple is given to the left hand and the patient can not see it, he cannot describe it (the right brain gets the information but unable to express it nor sends it to the left brain).  If the apple is put on the right hand, the patient can easily describe it. Conclusion: left hemisphere is responsible for language.
4) Aphasia 失语症
 Definition: a number of acquired language disorders due to the cerebral lesions 脑损害 caused by vascular problems血管问题，a tumour, an accident and so on.
 The study of aphasia is by far the most important tool in the investigation of language in the brain: By studying the symptoms, neurolinguists can identify the major components of language in the brain.
Types:
  Broca's aphasia:
The damage to parts of the brain in front of the central sulcus 中央回间沟前方的脑部损坏will cause non-fluent aphasia非流利失语症.
Its most severe form is global aphasia 整体性失语症: the patient is completely mute.
Another less severe one: Broca's aphasia布罗卡失语症:  with following features .
Phonologically: halting and lack of normal sentence intonation, ie, patients have great difficulty in producing the needed phonemes to say a word, and say very slowly, have a lot of hesitations.
Syntactically: the patients produce telegraphic speech, ie they omit functional words and inflectional affixes, often show difficulty judging the grammaticality of sentences.
Most patients show writing disturbances, unable to write the word pronounced correctly. In spontaneous writing, they omit function words and inflectional affixes----called acquired dyslexia习得性失读症 . Here "acquired" indicates that the patient possessed normal reading and writing ability prior to brain damage. It is different from developmental dyslexia. 发展性失读症---disturbances of reading and writing development in children.
  Wernicke's aphasia 韦尼克失语症
Damage to parts of the left cortex behind the central sulcus 中央回间沟后面的脑部损坏will result in fluent aphasia.
        Patients have no difficulty in producing the language, speaking very fluently with normal pronunciation and intonation and correct word order but often with little semantic meaning. They often have great difficulty in understanding a speech.
        The most important type of it is called Wernick's aphasia (Wernick-a German physiologist discovered it). Such patients are usually unaware of their deficit. They can not express themselves because they can not understand what they have just said an can not use that understanding to plan what to say next. They also show reading and writing deficits. They write with correct spelling and handwriting, but the writing makes little sense, like their speaking. In reading, they can see the letters an words, but they can not make any sense of them.
Conclusion: normal language is a combination of content and form. In non-fluent aphasia, form is compromised/ lost but the content remains relatively intact, while in fluent aphasia is a rapid flow of form with little content.
  Acquired dyslexia 习得性失读症
  Damage in and around the angular gyrus of the parietal lobe 体壁突出部位的角脑回及其周围的损伤causes the impairment of reading and writing ability, called acquired dyslexia.
  Two types:
Phonological dyslexia: 音位失读症：patients lose the ability to use spelling-to -sound rules. They can only read words that they have ever seen before. When asked an unknown word, they will say nothing or produce a known word similar to the unknown one.
Surface dyslexia表层失读症:  patients seem unable to recognize words as wholes but process all words through a set of spelling-to-sound rules. They do not have problem in reading the regularly spelled words, like " hat". When asked to read irregularly spelled words, they will use regular rules and produce the incorrect from and assign it a meaning belonging to the incorrect form. E.g  they read "sweat" as /swi:t/, and tells the meaning as "the opposite of bitter".

12.3 Psycholinguistics 
1) What is psycholinguistics
  Psycholinguistics is the study of language processing, concerned with the processes of language comprehension and production.
  Aim: to discover the nature of mental representation serving the function of language comprehension and production  心里表征的本质
to discover the nature of cognitive operations and computations in understanding and producing language. 认知操作和计算的本质

2）Psycholinguistic research methods
  Field work: 实地调查：Language processing involves mental processing and representation (difficult to be observed and measured directly), so linguists usually have to infer from the observable behavior, such as Spoonerisms 斯本内现象-slips of tongue made by Spooner in his lectures of sermons in Victorian age, e.g You have wasted the whole term. (intended sentence)
       You have tasted the whole worm (actual sentence by Spooner)  
Slips of tongues may happen to a single phoneme: (a phoneme is added, deleted or
Moved) or to a sequence of phonemes, affixed and roots, whole words or even phrases. Usually such errors occur at only one linguistic level per utterance, that is, a wrong words is said while the sentence is intact in syntax and phonology.
Slips of tongue prove that a sentence must be planed before it is produced; morpheme, rather than the word is the fundamental building block of English sentence production.
  Experimental methods 实验方法：researchers devise special experiments to control the circumstances, instead of waiting for linguistic behavior to take place. The methods include： lexical decision 词汇确定，the priming experiment启动试验,  timed-reading experiment 限时阅读试验 and eye movement experiment眼动试验.
Lexical decision: 词汇确定to investigate lexical access.
Method: a participant will see a string of letters, and then decide whether the string is a word or not (by saying or pressing Yes or No button). Time is recorded.
Variables: the time taken (speed) + whether the judgment is right (accuracy)
Findings: (1)less frequently used words take more  time to judge than frequently used words (called frequency effect 词频效应)
　　　       (2) pronounceable non-words take more time than unpronounceable non-words.
             (3) non-words looking like real words take more time than non-words, both visually and phonologically .
                 This tells us that aspects of phonology are automatically activated during word reading.
The priming experiment启动试验:
 Method: similar to lexical decision, except that the word to be judged (called target目标词) is preceded by another stimulus (called prime启动词), a semantically related word.
Purpose: to measure to what extent the prime influences the participant's lexical decision performance.
Two stages:　in the first stage: prime is given, no response is required or recorded
           In the second stage：the target is given, response is required (by naming the word or telling whether the string is a word) . Time is recorded. Times are compared between target in priming condition (with a prime) and no priming stimulus or a different priming stimulus ( no prime or unrelated prime)　
Findings:　time is different in situations with different primes. E.g if "bread" and "nurse" are given as different primes, the former takes less time for it is semantically related to the target (called priming effect 启动效应). It tells us that words are related in the mind in terms of networks.
Timed-reading experiment限时阅读试验：to study sentence processing difficulty. 
Assumption: the more difficult sentence processing is, the longer it should take.
Method: bar-pressing paradigm (commonly used) 按键法：subjects sit in front of a computer screen and read a sentence one word at a time in the middle of the screen. When the subject processes the word, he presses a bar (a key)  on the keyboard. The word disappears and another one appears. It continues until the subject has read all the words in the sentence.
Variable: the amount of time to take a subject to press the bar after seeing a particular word.
Findings: subjects do not show equal bar-pressing times across a sentence. Most nouns and verbs take more time than function words, like determiners, conj and prep. The longest time is taken at the end of the clause boundary since extra time is needed to put preceding information into a complete clause structure.
Eye movement experiment 眼动试验：another method to study sentence processing.
Method: eye- monitoring equipment is used to monitor eye movement in reading process, determining at which exact point a person's eye fixates
Findings: fixation times 注视时间are longer for less frequent words.
       The points of fixation are typically centered on content words, like nouns and verbs rather than on function words.
       Difficult sentence structures take longer fixation time and more regressing saccades ( reading back more often) 回复性快速扫视. So, fixation time is an indicator of the difficulty of information processing during reading.
Event-related potential experiment 事件相关电位测试(EPR)：another way to study
language processing
Method: the subject sits in front of a computer screen and reads like in normal language-processing situations. Electrodes 电极 are placed on the subject's scalp 头皮 and recordings are made of voltage fluctuations 电压波动resulting from the brain's electrical activity. A computer is used to calculate which part of the electrical brain activity脑电活动is related to words or sentences on a screen. 
 Findings: sentence processing is immediate and online即时的和在线的. When reading a sentence, we don't wait until the entire string is complete, but rather constantly building interpretations as it unfolds. When what is shown is contrary to our expectations based on our ongoing interpretations, a negative voltage is observed.
3) Linguistics and language processing
   Two methods in language processing: Language processing involves a constant interplay between bottom-up and top-down processing.
  Bottom-up: 自下而上处理/ 认识法: we mainly use the information which is already present in the data. Hearing a sentence, a person has phonetic analysis to isolate phonemes and word boundaries, and relate them to representations in the mental lexicon. That is, we distinguish phonemes and words from sounds, and match them with the words kept in our mind. Such a inductive analysis 归纳分析is called bottom up.
 Top-down processing: we mainly use our previous knowledge, our expectations to deal with the data. That is, we do not wait to understand a sentence until we finish analyzing all the phonemes in it. Instead, we begin interpretation of a sentence spontaneously and automatically on the basis of whatever information is available to us. We process phonetic features, phonemes and syllables all at the same time.
  Phonetic and phonology: 
Phonology:　phonological feature in slips of tongue: voicing , e,g people read "pick" as "pig" (voiced).
　　　　Syllables are important in speech perception. In one study, subjects identify syllables faster than identifying single segment (the extracted minimal linguistic unit, like phone, morphs ) because subjects usually break down the stimuli into syllables and then, if necessary , into segments.
Phonetic: cohort model 交股模型 （cohort---in experiment research有共同特点的一组人：a group of people who have some feature in common, e.g. age, IQ, how long they study a foreign language etc, here it refers to a group of words with some common features ）: hearers analyze one phoneme at a time rather than one syllable at a time, and the process goes from beginning to end (beginning-to-end analysis) . Three stages of spoken word analysis: (1) a set of lexical candidates are activated, e.g. "She has lost her ba…", many other words will be available for selection, like "bag, bat, bath…" (2) one member of the cohort is selected for further analysis, like "bat" . The selection is influenced by phonetic input, word frequency and the ongoing discourse. (3) the selected word is integrated in to the ongoing semantic and syntactic context. 
  Morphological process :
priming experiment:  It is found that for most multimorphemic words, individual morphemes are automatically activated during word recognition, e.g. for the word "boyish" , the activation of this word automatically activates the root "boy" 
   selectional restrictions: 选择限制：It is found that the knowledge of selectional restrictions of affixed is one part of word-processing. In one experiment, subjects are exposed to words with prefixes and suffixes, also nonsense roots with prefixes and suffixes. More time is taken for nonsense words than for morphologically legal words.
  Hierarchical structure 等级结构：in priming experiment , two forms are given "refillable"( "fillable" is not a real word)  and "unbearable" ("bearable" is a real one). First "fillable" is given, then "refillable" . It is found that less time is taken for real morphological units than for unreal ones. It shows that our presentation of complex words is organized in terms of hierarchical morphological structure.
  Syntax:　Psychological research has found that the number of transformations in a sentence did not predict processing time, so the system rules to describe sentence structure must be different from those used in sentence production and comprehension. Thus, a new processing model is formulated, called the syntactic parser 句法处理器, a system using grammar knowledge, including special procedures and principles to guide order of processing and manner of building up of syntactic structure. 运用语法知识，引导句子处理顺序及句法结构建立的特别步骤和原则。So here "module" refers to a unit of processing that is relatively self-governing / independent of other processing units.
Two sources of evidence: garden path sentences and sentence ambiguity.
Garden path sentence: 花园小径句: an awkward sentence that misleads the syntactic parser and takes it down the garden path to the wrong analysis.  E.g. "The horse raced past the barn fell" The first understanding is "race" is the predicate, but when we get to the word "fell", we have to read back and reinterpret it. The right understanding is "fell" is the predicate while "race past" is a post-modifier ("race"
means 使.. 快跑）For garden path sentences, more fast reading back and longer fixation time are usually needed .
 Two principles of parsing : minimal attachment起码连接 and late closure后封闭.
Minimal attachment: we prefer to attach new items into the phrase marker with fewest links, e.g. in "He kissed Mary and her sister" Two interpretations: "He kissed both Mary and her sister" or " He just kissed Mary, and her sister … ("her sister" is taken as the beginning of a new phrase / clause ). According to minimal attachemtn, we prefer the first interpretation.
 Late closure: wherever possible, we prefer to attach new items to the current constituent, e.g "Tom said that Bill went out yesterday" Two ways to attach the adv "yesterday": "Tom said yesterday that Bill …" "Tom said that Bill did…yesterday" We prefer the second one: to attach the adverb to the subordinate clause.
  Sentence ambiguity : In the sentence "They all rose" , rose may mean "stood" or "flower". In order to see how many meanings are activated, in priming experiment, subjects are given either of "flower" or "stand". It is found that both meanings are activated. It shows that in processing a sentence, we create all representations possible an d then discard / abandon the ones which are either incorrect or unnecessary.
4) psycholinguistic modeling 心理语言学模式
  The most influential psycholinguistic model of speech production produced by Levelt (P 193) .
 The figure: 
Here the four boxed--- constellations of activities 活动集合
  Names of the boxes---to indicate the action
  Arrow connecting the boxes---to indicate the order of process
  Boxes are arranged in space---to indicate what activities take place simultaneously.
 Four stages indicated by the figure:
(1) Conceptualization概念化-we conceptualize what we wish to communicate.
(2) Formulating形成---we formulate this thought into linguistic plan in the Formulator构成工具 : including grammatical and phonological process, and lexicon
(3) Articulating发音-the information is passed from the Formulator to the Articulator and utterances are produced.
(4) Self-governing自我监测--- we monitor our speech to judge whether it is what we intended to say and how we intended to say it. That is, the information does not flow in one direction only; when a speaker produces language, he monitors through the comprehension system whether the utterance makes sense.