I.F.D.

N° 7

Neurolinguistics

Producing and perceiving speech requires our brains to do a lot of work. Hundreds of thousands, millions
of nerves have to kick into action to receive, process and send signals to other parts of the body involved
with talking and listening. The study of what our brains do when we produce or perceive language is
called Neurolinguistics.
Neurolinguistics, an offspring of psycholinguistics, investigates how the human brain creates and
processes speech and language. It is the study of the relationship between language and the brain: what
happens to language input and how output is programmed and formed inside the brain. Its object of
study is the language and the brain, i.e. how language is represented in the brain.

Neurolinguists measure our brain activity -speaking, listening to speech, reading, and even thinking
about speaking. They do this so they can find out which parts of our brain are active and how the different
parts interact during specific tasks (speaking, listening, and so on).
Neurolinguists are interested in the correlation between brain damage and speech and language deficits.
They also study special cases of language loss and impairment. The brain is the most complex organ in
the human body. As part of the nervous system the brain coordinates all the body's functions.

Not ordinary organ

The human brain is like nothing else. As organs go, it is not especially prepossessing—3lb (1.4kg) or so
of rounded, corrugated flesh with a consistency somewhere between jelly and cold butter. It doesn’t
expand and shrink like the lungs, pump like the heart, or secrete visible material like the bladder. If you
sliced off the top of someone’s head and peered inside, you wouldn’t see much happening at all.
Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that for centuries the contents of our skulls were regarded as
relatively unimportant. When they mummified their dead, the ancient Egyptians scooped out the brains
and threw them away, yet carefully preserved the heart. The Ancient Greek philospher, Aristotle,
thought the brain was a radiator for cooling the blood. René Descartes, the French scientist, gave it a
little more respect, concluding that it was a sort of antenna by which the spirit might commune with the
body. It is only now that the full wonder of the brain is being realized.

The most basic function of the brain is to keep the rest of the body alive. Among your brain’s 100 billion
neurons, some regulate your breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure and others control hunger, thirst,
sex drive, and sleep cycle. In addition to this, the brain generates the emotions, perceptions, and thoughts
that guide your behavior. Then it directs and executes your actions. Finally, it is responsible for the
conscious awareness of the mind itself.

Until about 100 years ago, the only evidence that brain and mind were connected was obtained from
“natural experiments”—accidents in which head injuries created aberrations in
their victims’ behavior.
Dedicated physicians mapped out areas of the cerebral landscape by observing the
subjects of such experiments while they were alive— then matching their deficits
to the damaged areas of their brains. It was slow work because the scientists had
to wait for their subjects to die before they could look at the physiological
evidence. As a result, until the early 20th century, all that was known about the
physical basis of the mind could have been contained in a single volume.
Since then, scientific and technological advances have fuelled a neuroscientific revolution. Powerful
microscopes made it possible to look in detail at the brain’s intricate anatomy. A growing understanding
of electricity allowed the dynamics of the brain to be recognized and then, with the advent of
electroencephalography (EEG), to be observed and measured. Finally, the arrival of functional brain
imaging machines allowed scientists to look inside the living brain and see its mechanisms at work. In
the last 20 years, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),

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and, most recently, magnetic encephalography (MEG) have among them

produced an ever more detailed map of the brain’s functions.
Today we can point to the circuitry that keeps our vital processes going,
the cells that produce our neurotransmitters, the synapses where signals
leap from cell to cell, and the nerve fibers that convey pain or move our
limbs. More than just a map, the picture emerging from imaging studies
reveals the brain to be an astonishingly complex, sensitive system in
which each part affects almost every other. Neuroscientific investigation of the brain is very much a
work in progress and no one knows what the finished picture will look like. It may be that the brain is
so complicated that it can never understand itself entirely.

A journey through the brain

The brain is the last of the human organs to give its secrets. For a long time, people were not even able
to understand what the brain is for. The discovery of its anatomy, functions and processes has been a
long and slow journey across the millennia, as human knowledge about this mysterious organ has
developed and accumulated. It is the most complex organ in the body and is probably the most complex
system known to humankind. Our brain contains billions of neurons that are constantly sending signals
to each other, and it is this signaling that creates our minds. With the help of modern scanning
technology, we now know about the brain structure in great detail.
 Anatomy
The brain’s major parts can be classified or categorized in several ways. It consists of four main regions:
the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the brain stem, and the diencephalon.
The largest section is the cerebrum. It controls higher functions such as learning, reasoning, speech plus
senses like sight and hearing.
Under the cerebrum is the second largest part of the brain: the cerebellum. It carries signals to other parts
of the brain and the spinal cord. It is responsible for coordinating muscle movements. Its functions are
motor learning, sense of body position, balance and equilibrium fine movement coordination.
The third region, the brainstem lies in front of the cerebellum. It is composed of different parts and they
control vital functions like cardiac activity, respiration, digestion and sleep.
The fourth region is located above the brainstem: the diencephalon, a grouping of several structures.
These structures govern sensations, weight regulation, energy and instinctual behavior - eating,
drinking.

Upper vs. lower

The brain’s physical structure broadly reflects its mental
organization. In general, higher mental processes occur in
the upper regions, while the brain’s lower regions take care
of basic life support. The upper surface of the brain consists
of 'grey matter' (that is its colour when exposed to air)
known as the cerebral cortex (or cortical area). It deals with
many of the more complex operations, including making
connections with stored information, analysing input and
controlling sophisticated muscular movements. Below it is the sub-cortex of 'white matter', which is
mainly nerve cell fibres. In general, the lower parts of the brain are responsible for reflex actions,

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controlling functions such as breathing and heart beats. The cerebellum at the base of the brain has a
delicate role in co-ordinating a, range of muscular movements which have become highly automatic.
Left vs. right
In the brain the dominant part is the cerebrum, the large pinky-gray wrinkled structure that forms
more than three-quarters of the brain’s total volume. The cerebrum is divided into left and right
hemispheres, which are linked by a “bridge” of nerve fibers, the corpus callosum. Structurally, the left
and right cerebral hemispheres look broadly similar. Functionally, however, speech and language,
stepwise reasoning and analysis, and certain communicating actions are based mainly on the left side in
most people. Since nerve fibers cross from
left to right at the base of the brain, this
dominant left side receives sensory
information from, and sends messages to,
muscles in the right side of the body—
including the right hand. Meanwhile, the
right hemisphere is more concerned with
sensory inputs, auditory and visual
awareness, creative abilities, and spatial–
temporal awareness (what happens in our
surroundings, second by second).
Generalising enormously, the left
hemisphere in most individuals is associated with analytic processing and symbolisation, while the right
is associated with perceptual and spatial representation.

Front vs. back

The outer surface of the brain
is marked by mounds (gyri) and
valleys (sulci). These serve to
mark out four major regions in
each hemisphere, known as
lobes. The cortex can be divided into four areas called lobes
such as the frontal lobe at the front, the temporal lobe
running from front to back and the occipital and parietal
lobes at the back.
 Functions
The primary task of the brain is to help maintain the whole body in an optimal state relative to the
environment, in order to maximize the chances of survival. The brain does this by registering stimuli
and then responding by generating actions.
The brain receives a constant stream of information as electrical impulses from neurons in the sense
organs. The first thing it does is determine whether the information warrants attention. If it is irrelevant
or just confirmation that everything is staying the same, it is allowed to fade away and we are not
conscious of it. But if it is novel or important, the brain amplifies the signals, causing them to be
represented in various regions. If this activity is sustained for long enough, it will result in a conscious
experience. In some cases, thoughts are taken one step further, and the brain instructs the body to act
on them, by sending signals to the muscles to make them contract.

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No one knows exactly how electrical activity turns into experience. However, much is now known about
the brain processes that turn incoming information into the various components of subjective
experience, such as thoughts or emotions. Much depends on where the information comes from. Each
sense organ is specialized to deal with a different type of stimulus—the eyes are sensitive to light, the
ears to sound waves, and so on. The sense organs respond to these stimuli in much the same way—they
generate electrical signals, which are sent on for further processing. But the information from each organ
is sent to a different part of the brain, and then processed along a different neural pathway. Where
information is processed therefore determines what sort of experience it will generate.

ACTIONS
Certain brain areas are specialized to produce body movement. Brainstem
modules control automatic internal actions, such as the lung and chest movements
needed for breathing, the beating of the heart, and the constriction or dilation of
blood vessels to control blood pressure. In conscious activities, the primary motor
cortex sends messages (via the cerebellum and basal ganglia) to the muscles of
the limbs, trunk, and head to create gross movements.

MEMORIES
Some of the experiences we have change brain cells in such a way that the pattern
of neural activity that produced the original experience can be replicated later in
time. This process gives rise to recall, or memory, which enables us to use past
experiences as a guide to how to behave in the present.

THOUGHTS
The brain uses sensations, perceptions, and emotions to generate action plans.
Some of the plans give rise to internalized brain activity, or thoughts. “Inner
speech,” for example, is actually generated by the motor areas, but has no visible
sign. Some activity occurs in the hippocampus, which we experience as
recollection.

EMOTIONS
Certain stimuli (including some thoughts and imaginings) cause changes in the
body by activating areas in the limbic system, especially the amygdala. Conscious
“feelings” occur when signals from the limbic system are sent on to “association
areas” in the prefrontal cortex that support consciousness. During adolescence,
the amygdala is relied heavily upon for processing emotional information,
because the prefrontal cortex only matures when a person reaches their late 20s.

SENSATIONS
Information from the environment enters the brain via the different sense organs
and is transmitted to specific areas of the cerebral cortex called the primary
sensory areas. This information includes some input from the body itself. In the
absence of external stimuli, the sensory areas continue to be active and are
thought to generate the experiences that we know as dreams, hallucinations, and
imagination.

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PERCEPTIONS
Most of the time we are receiving information from many sensory areas at once,
as with the combination of auditory and visual signals at a fireworks display.
These signals may be communicated to association areas, which bind all of this
information together. If these items of “bound” information become conscious,
they form what is known as a multisensory perception. There is a great deal of
current neuroscientific research on how the binding process forms a unified
perception, because it is still not fully understood.

LANGUAGE
Language involves both producing speech and analysing what others say to
understand the meaning. It depends on the brain’s ability to link objects with
abstract symbols and then to convey the symbols—and thus the ideas they
represent—to others via words. In addition to facilitating communication
between people, language enables individuals to reflect on their own ideas.

The human brain

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Memory

Most of our moment –to- moment experiences pass rapidly into oblivion, but a tiny few are encoded in
the brain as memories. When we remember an event, the neurons involved in generating the original
experience are reactivated. However, recollections are not replays of the past, but reconstructions of it.
The primary purpose of memory is to provide information to guide our actions in the present, and to do
this efficiently we generally retain only those experiences that are in some way useful. Our recall of the
past is therefore selective and unreliable.

 What is memory?
A memory may be the ability to recall a
poem or recognize a face on demand; a
vague vision of some long past event; the
skill required to ride a bike; or the
knowledge that your door keys are on the
table.
What all these phenomena have in
common is that they involve learning,
and total or partial reconstruction of a
past experience.
Learning is a process in which neurons
that fire together to produce a particular
experience are altered so that they have a
tendency to fire together again. The
subsequent combined firing of the
neurons reconstructs the original
experience, producing a “recollection” of
it. The act of recollecting makes the
neurons involved even more likely to fire
again in the future, so repeatedly
reconstructing an event makes it
increasingly easy to recall.
Memory involves a wide range of facets and functions, from deeply rooted instincts to conscious factual
knowledge. These are associated with different areas throughout the brain.

 Short- and long -term memories

Short-term memories generally stay with us only as long as we need them. A telephone number you use
just once is an example. Short-term memories are held in the mind by a process of “working” memory.
Long-term memories, in contrast, can be
recalled years or even decades later. The
address of your childhood home may be such
a memory. In between these extremes, we
have many medium-term memories, which
may last for months or years and finally fade
away.Many different factors determine
whether an experience or item of knowledge
is destined to be a short- or a long-term memory. These include their emotional content, novelty, and
the amount of effort that we make to practice recalling them.

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Intelligence

Deciding what to do in a complex world takes thought. By thinking we can explore the potential
consequences of our actions in our imagination. This, in turn, involves holding one or more ideas in
mind and manipulating them. Thinking is an active, usually draws on several areas of the brain.
Thinking underpins some particularly human abilities and tendencies, including creativity and the
construction of imaginative explanations for our experiences.

 What is intelligence?
Intelligence refers to the ability to learn
about, learn from, understand, and
interact with one’s environment. It
embraces many different types of skills,
such as physical dexterity, verbal fluency,
and concrete and abstract reasoning,
sensory discrimination, emotional
sensitivity, numeracy, and also the ability
to function well in society.
The frontal lobes are thought to be the
seat of intelligence, as damage to these
areas affects the ability to concentrate,
make sound judgments, and so on. Yet
frontal-lobe damage does not always affect
a person’s IQ (“intelligence quotient,”
measured by testing spatial, verbal, and
mathematical dexterity), so other brain
areas must also be involved. Research
suggests that intelligence relies on a
neural “superhighway” linking the frontal
lobes, which plan and organize, with the
parietal lobes, which integrate sensory
information. The speed at which the
frontal lobes receive ready-to-use data via
this route may affect IQ, as does the extent to which frontal-lobe activity is enhanced by education.

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Language areas in the brain

Humans have an innate capacity for language – a faculty that seems to rely on one or more genes that
are unique to our species. It is not known, though, whether language arose as direct result of genetic
mutation or as a result of the interaction between subtle biological changes and environmental pressures.

Compared to the brains of other species, human brains are less symmetrical in terms of functions.
Language is the most obvious example of this lop-sidedness, and the vast majority of people have the
main language areas on the left side of the brain, although a few seem to have language functions
distributed on both sides, and some have it only on the right.
Generally, language is associated with the “dominant” side of
the brain—that is, the one that controls the most competent
hand. Language is thought by some to be the mechanism that
elevates the brain to full consciousness, and before language
evolved, it is possible that our ancestors were not consciously
aware of themselves. Because language is so important,
disruptions have awful consequences, so brain surgeons have
to be very careful to avoid damaging the language areas. This
is one of the reasons for the Wada test. The Wada test, named
after Canadian neurologist Juhn Wada, involves anesthetizing
one hemisphere of the brain while leaving the other fully active.
This is possible because each hemisphere of the brain has its
own blood supply. If the patient is able to speak when one brain
hemisphere is asleep, the principal language areas must be on
the conscious side. This information is vital for surgeons to
plan operations. The Wada test will eventually be replaced by
advanced scanning techniques.

Language: A Left Hemisphere Phenomenon

In September 1848, near Cavendish, Vermont, a railroad worker called Phineas

P. Gage was in charge of a construction crew blasting away rocks to lay a new
stretch of railway line. Unfortunately, he blew a hole in the front of his brain
with a tamping rod. He survived with little damage to most of his faculties, but
his behavior changed dramatically. This polite, well-liked American railroad
foreman changed dramatically, becoming “grossly profane,” after an accident
destroyed part of his brain. His case was the first to show that faculties
This reconstruction of
Phineas Gage’s skull shows such as social and moral judgment can be localized to the frontal lobes.
how an iron rod damaged the Even though, this huge metal rod had gone through the front part of Mr.
frontal lobes of his brain. Gage’s brain, his language abilities were unaffected. He was a medical
marvel. The point of this rather amazing tale is that, while language may
be located in the brain, it clearly is not situated right at the front.

For nearly a century and a half, scholars have debated the question of speech and language localization
within the brain. In the 1860s, scientists known as localizationists speculated that the functioning of
specific regions in the brain was responsible for language. Antilocalizationists argued that speech and
language were the consequence of the brain functioning as a whole.

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In 1861, Paul Broca, a French surgeon and anatomist, described to the Socie’te’ d’Anthropologie in Paris
a patient who in life had had extreme difficulty in producing speech. Later, at autopsy, the patient was
found to have damage in the posterior inferior part of the frontal lobe in the left cerebral hemisphere,
now known as Broca’s area (This part of the brain is technically described as the “anterior speech
cortex”). With the publication of this report Broca became the first individual to substantiate the claim
that damage to a specific area of the brain results in a speech deficit. In 1863 he reported that during a
research among 20 patients who suffered from severe language impairments, he found out that 19 out
of 20 patients with damage to this specific part of the brain was related to extreme difficulty in producing
speech. It was also noted that damage to the corresponding area on the right hemisphere had no such
effect. This finding was first used to argue that language ability must be located in the left hemisphere
and since then has been treated as an indication that Broca’s is crucially involved in the production of
speech.

In 1874, Carl Wernicke, a young German physician, published a monograph describing patients with
speech comprehension deficits who had damage (lesions) outside Broca’s area, in the left posterior
temporal lobe (This part of the brain is the “posterior speech cortex”) known as Wernicke’s area.
Wernicke’s work strengthened Broca’s claim that left hemispheric structures are essential for speech
and generated intense interest in the hypothesis that different areas within the left hemisphere fulfill
different linguistic functions. This finding confirmed the left hemisphere location of language ability
and led to the view that Wernicke’s area is part of the brain crucially involved in the understanding of
speech.

Today scientists agree that specific neuroanatomic structures, generally of the left hemisphere, are vital
for speech and language, but debate continues as to which structures are committed to the various
linguistic capacities. For most individuals the left cerebral hemisphere is dominant for language,
regardless of handedness. Approximately 70 percent of all individuals with damage to the left
hemisphere will experience some type of aphasia, as compared with only 1 percent of those with right
hemispheric lesions.
Confirmation of left cerebral language dominance has come from many research techniques, one of which
was introduced by Juhn Wada in 1949. Wada reported that the injection of sodium amytal into the main
(carotid) artery on the language-dominant side of the brain induces a temporary aphasia. Physicians have
subsequently used this technique as a means of determining cerebral dominance in patients facing
neurosurgery; in this way, they can avoid damaging the language centers during surgery.

When you read something, you first need to detect the words and then to interpret them by determining
context and meaning. This complex process involves many brain regions. Detecting text usually
involves the optic nerve and other nerve bundles delivering signals from the eyes to the visual cortex at
the back of the brain. If you are reading in Braille, you use the sensory cortex towards the top of the
brain. If you listen to someone else reading, then you use the auditory cortex not far from your ears. To
speak sensibly, you must think of words to convey an idea or message, formulate them into a sentence
according to grammatical rules and then use your lungs, vocal cords and mouth to create sounds.
Regions in your frontal, temporal and parietal lobes formulate what you want to say and the motor
cortex, in your frontal lobe, enables you to speak the words.
The motor cortex is the primary area of the brain for the initiation of all voluntary muscular movement.
The sensory cortex is the primary location for processing all sensations to the brain from the body. The
part shown as (3) in the illustration is the motor cortex, an area that generally controls movement of
the muscles (for moving hands, feet, arms, etc.). Close to Broca’s area is the part of the motor cortex that

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controls the articulatory muscles of the face, jaw, tongue and larynx. Evidence that this area is involved
in the physical articulation of speech comes from work reported in the 1950s by two neurosurgeons,
Penfield and Roberts (1959). These researchers found that, by applying small amounts of electrical
current to specific areas of the brain, they could identify those areas where the electrical stimulation
would interfere with normal speech production. The part shown as (4) is a bundle of nerve fibers called
the arcuate fasciculus. This was also one of Wernicke’s discoveries and is now known to form a crucial
connection between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas.

Language processing occurs mainly in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Broadly speaking, words are
comprehended by Wernicke’s area and articulated by Broca’s. A thick band of tissue called the articulate
fasciculus connects these two areas. Damage to either of these areas will often (but not always) lead to a
condition known as aphasia, in which patients lose some of their powers of speech. The type of language
impairment varies considerably according to which of the two areas is damaged.

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