Brain and Language I

Ashwini Vaidya

16th Jan 2023

(HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Brain and Language I 16th Jan 2023 1 / 24

Introduction

When we think of language as cognitive ability, some questions

naturally arise-
I What is the nature of human language?
I What is the nature of the brain
I What is the relationship between the two?

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Relationship between mind and brain
I We study the relationship of language and brain not only because it
tells us something about language, it provides insight into the nature of
the brain itself
I The study of the biological and neural foundations of language is called
neurolinguistics

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Language processes carried out by networks of neurons in the brain
How are these networks organized? Is there specialization of
functions?
Two methods are chiefly used to understand links between language
processing and the brain
I Imaging studies, Neurophysiological studies (fMRI, EEG)
I Studies on brain-damaged patients
This allows researchers to focus on the neural underpinnings of
language

(HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Brain and Language I 16th Jan 2023 4 / 24

 Language processes carried out by networks of neurons in the brain
How are these networks organized? Is there specialization of
functions?
Two methods are chiefly used to understand links between language
processing and the brain
I Imaging studies, Neurophysiological studies (fMRI, EEG)
I Studies on brain-damaged patients
This allows researchers to focus on the neural underpinnings of
language

Research on language in the mind: how we perceive language, learn it and

produce it (mental processes)
Research on language in the brain: localization of linguistic abilities
(implementation in the brain)

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Mental functions in the brain

Early scientists like Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) proposed the idea
of localization i.e. different cognitive abilities being localized in
specific areas of the brain
These were somewhat fanciful- language located near the eyes ,
regions for ‘friendship’ and ‘hope’
Most of these ideas are not taken seriously- however localization as
an idea was upheld by subsequent brain research

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Gall’s somewhat amusing ideas

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Gall also introduced the notion of phrenology - the idea that
personality traits and intelligence could be determined by the ‘bumps’
on the skull
Such ideas are now largely discredited, but in the early 1800s they
were extremely popular
Fuelled ‘scientific racism’, where these ideas were used to justify ideas
about the superiority of a white race (and ‘deficits’ in others, e.g.
Native Americans)
By 1888 these ideas were already losing their importance, and were
discarded as pseudoscience

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Brain anatomy

Brain
The surface of the brain is the cortex, often called ‘gray matter,’
consisting of billions of neurons
The brain is composed of cerebral hemispheres on the right and left
These hemispheres are joined by the corpus callosum, a network that
allows the two hemispheres to communicate with each other
I In general, the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and
the right hemisphere controls the left side (contralateral)

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Where is language located in the brain?

Evidence for language in the left hemisphere came from studies of

brain injury patients
Simon Aubertin (early 1800s) examined a patient whose left frontal
lobe was exposed after a brain injury
When he pressed on this region with a spatula, the patient stopped
communicating
This led him to believe that language does not arise due to action in
the entire brain
This contradicted the idea that language/intellectual abilities involve
the participation of the entire brain

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Leborgne and Lelong

19th century researchers studied patients with brain damage

In the mid-1800s, a 30 year old Louis Victor Leborgne was admitted
to a Paris hospital
He could only utter a single syllable ‘Tan’ (and the occasional swear
word) if not understood
About 20 years later, another patient Lelong was admitted to the
same hospital- he could also only speak 4-5 words
Paul Broca attended to both these patients and after they died, he
examined their brain- both appeared to have lesions in the same areas
Broca termed this aphémie- and it provided crucial evidence for
localization

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Susanne Rother

Carl Wernicke described the symptoms of Susanne Adam and

Susanne Rother, who were able to speak apparently fluently
However, the speech was characterized by neologisms (new words)
and semantic anomalies
Problems accessing the phonological (sound) and lexical (meaning)
information that goes along with words
When Rother died, and her brain examined, she had damage in the
posterior (rear) portions of her brain, near the place where the
temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes meet.

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Language disorders

Aphasia
Any language disorder that results from brain damage caused by
disease or trauma
Paul Broca proposed that language is localized to the left hemisphere
of the brain, and more specifically to the frontal part of the left
hemisphere (now called Broca’s area)
Carl Wernicke, described another variety of aphasia that occurred in
patients with lesions in areas of the left hemisphere temporal lobe,
now known as Wernicke’s area

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Brain and Language

Lateralization refers to the

localization of function to one
hemisphere of the brain
Language is said to be
lateralized to the left
hemisphere

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Broca’s aphasia

Patient has damage in left frontal region of the brain due to a stroke

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Wernicke’s aphasia

Damage in the left posterior temporal and lower parietal region, also due
to stroke
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Aphasia

Aphasia
Most aphasics do not show total language loss, rather, we see
selective impairment
The kind of impairment is related to the location of the brain damage
We can see certain linguistic characteristics of the two types of
aphasias
While each patient is different and there is sometimes not an exact
mapping of (cognitive) deficit and brain area, a broad set of
syndromes can be described
These give us evidence for where language processing can be localized
in a healthy or undamaged brain

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Broca’s Aphasia

Broca’s Aphasia
This type of aphasia is also known as agrammatic aphasia
Primarily affects a persons ability to form sentences with the rules of
syntax
Language lacks articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and
other grammatical elements
Brocas aphasics also typically omit inflections such as the past tense
suffix -ed or the third person singular verb ending -s
DOCTOR: Could you tell me what you have been doing in the hospital?
PATIENT Yes, sure. Me go, er, uh, P.T. [physical therapy] none o’cot,
speech . . . two times . . . read . . . r . . . ripe . . . rike . . . uh
write . . . practice . . . get . . . ting . . . better

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Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.

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Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.
It is equally plausible for the cat to be chased by the dog or vice versa
(if the passive form is difficult to process)

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Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.
It is equally plausible for the cat to be chased by the dog or vice versa
(if the passive form is difficult to process)
This does not hold if the meaning can be derived non-syntactically

(HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Brain and Language I 16th Jan 2023 18 / 24

Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.
It is equally plausible for the cat to be chased by the dog or vice versa
(if the passive form is difficult to process)
This does not hold if the meaning can be derived non-syntactically
I e.g. The car was chased by the dog.

(HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Brain and Language I 16th Jan 2023 18 / 24

Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.
It is equally plausible for the cat to be chased by the dog or vice versa
(if the passive form is difficult to process)
This does not hold if the meaning can be derived non-syntactically
I e.g. The car was chased by the dog.
Broca’s aphasics tend to have difficulty with the former, but use
world-knowledge to guess the latter.

(HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Brain and Language I 16th Jan 2023 18 / 24

Broca’s aphasia

Difficulty understanding complex sentences

The cat was chased by the dog.
It is equally plausible for the cat to be chased by the dog or vice versa
(if the passive form is difficult to process)
This does not hold if the meaning can be derived non-syntactically
I e.g. The car was chased by the dog.
Broca’s aphasics tend to have difficulty with the former, but use
world-knowledge to guess the latter.
Broca’s area seems to be connected to serialization of the action of
the speech organs

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Wernicke’s Aphasia

Wernicke’s Aphasia
Patients have fluent speech with good intonation, and adhere to the
rules of syntax, sometimes also called fluent aphasia
But language is often semantically incoherent, difficult to recall
content words aka anomia
Difficulty naming objects presented to them and also in choosing
words in spontaneous speech
They may make numerous lexical errors (word substitutions), often
producing jargon and nonsense words
While Broca’s aphasics visibly struggle to produce speech, Wernicke’s
aphasics are unaware that they’re making no sense
I The only thing that I can say again is madder or modder fish sudden
fishing sewed into the accident to miss in the purdles.

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Aphasia

Aphasia
Damage to different parts of the brain results in different kinds of
linguistic impairment (e.g., syntactic versus semantic).
This supports the hypothesis that mental grammar consists of distinct
components or modules with different functions.
E.g content words and function words appear to be processed in
different brain areas
Note that the extent of damage to language comprehension can
depend on the amount of damage to the area (varies among patients)

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Right hemisphere damage does not generally result in language
impairment- but it can affect other cognitive abilities like facial
recognition or pattern recognition
Some patients with right hemisphere damage cannot understand
intonation related to emotional states
They also have difficulty in understanding metaphors, puns or other
figurative language
This seems to indicate that the right hemisphere is also playing some
role in language comprehension

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Brain Imaging Techniques
Imaging
we no longer need to rely on surgery or autopsy to locate brain lesions
or to identify the language regions of the brain
Non-invasive brain recording technologies (fMRI, PET etc)
The images that we saw earlier were MRI (magnetic resonance
imaging) scans
Scanning techniques like MEG permit us to measure metabolic
activity in particular areas of the brain
Areas of greater activity are those most involved in the mental
processes at the moment of the scan
I e.g., the brains of normal adults are observed when they are asked to
listen to two or more sounds and determine if they are the same
I e.g., listen to or read sequences of words and say whether they form
grammatical or ungrammatical sentences
The results of these studies reaffirm the earlier findings that language
resides in specific areas of the left hemisphere
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EEG (Electroencephalography)
I monitor electrical activity of the brain via placing electrodes on the
scalp
I it’s non-invasive
I Signature effect that can be characterized to specific processes

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Reference

Fromkin, Victoria, and Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. 2003. An

Introduction to Language. 9th edition. Wadsworth. pp. 43–69.

Mark Liberman’s Ling 001 course, Brain and Language

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/neurology.html

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