LING 1P92 Introduction to the Psychology of Language Fall

2014
Seminar Discussion Questions
Week of Sept. 15: Language and the Brain
4. The characteristics of aphasia discussed in lecture and in the reading, that is
evident are disfluent speech with a lot of pauses and reputation, poorly articulated
speech and sound errors. For example, the words are full of a lot of the people
having trouble saying a word, so it is low labored speech and it is telegraphic. It
lacks the words need to form complete and structured sentences. The aphasia I
believe that the patient has based on the speech is that they have Brocas Area
damage. The area in the brain where you would see this damage would be the
frontal, close to the Sylvian Fissure.
Abilities of people with Brocas
- Have an insight into their condition.
- Speech is slower paced, with lots of pauses
- There are able to communicate a message with meaning.
- Telegraphic in their speech
- Ability to recognize objects
Abilities of people with Wernickes
- Fluent in speech.
- Do not have a lot of pauses, or repetition
- Can talk in a normal pace with pitch raises.
- Are not telegraphic in their speech.
- However, they do not have meaning to words, often speech sounds like, a
word salad
- Have the ability to talk in excess.
- Receptive
5. Results:

The pattern of results suggests that the hemisphere of the brain that is associated
with language comprehension is heard well from the right ear. Therefore, it is
processed in the left hemisphere. In the Wada test the first patient stopped counting
because of the injection into her left hemisphere were language is formed and
processed so the patient could speak. Once it was cleared from her brain, speech
function returned. In the second test, the right hemisphere was injected; she was
asked to move her fingers while counting, it has retained speech. However, it caused
disorientated movement of the opposing hand. The test concluded that speech is
formed primarily in the left hemisphere while motor control was primarily found in
the right.
6. A person with a split brain is unable to name an object presented to his left
visual field because the part of the brain that correlates to the life vision field is the
right side, which does not produce language as the left hemisphere does because
language is lateralized in the left hemisphere. Therefore, they are able to understand
the object but because the brain is split and the connection between the two
hemispheres is not shared the person is unable to orally speak the name of the
object.