NEUROLINGUIS

TICS
Presented by
Ahmad
Hamad
Khatatneh
 Introduction

History of Neurolinguistics

Neuroimaging

Outline Phonological Disorders

Disorders of Morphology and Syntax

Lexical Disorders

Pragmatics Disorders

Genetics
What is Neurolinguistics

Sciences involve
• The study of how the brain
control the human language and
with it
communication, Ahlsén (2006).

*Computer science *Psychology

*Neuroanatomy *Psycholinguistics

*Speech pathology *Linguistic theory

 History of Neuro-linguistics

• Paul Broca (1860s),

 Language is localized in the left
hemisphere, Broca’s area.
Patient understand but could not speak or
write a sentence.

• Carl Wernicke (1870s)

 Discovered another part involved in
understanding language, in the left
temporal lobe.
 Incoherent speech and make no sense.
 • Lichtheim (1885)
 Proposed the concept center
 Interpret the meaning of the words.

Aphasia Cause and Symptoms

Conduction (disrupted connection Wernicke - Broca)
 Disturbed repetition

Transcortical Sensory (disrupted connection Wernicke - Concept center):

 Disturbed comprehension

Transcortical Motor (disrupted connection Concept center - Broca):

 Disturbed speech.
Language specific areas in the brain

Hickok (2009)
Source of Our Neuro Knowledge

• Brain imaging is one of the main

methods to study the brain,
Rodden and Stemmer (2008)

Computer Simulation Connectionist

networks
Dynamic Images EEG, MEG,
PET, fMRI
 Near-
EEG MEG fMRI
Infrared

- Detect the - Detects the - Detect blood-oxygen - Detect blood

electrical brain magnetic fields level increase in the pressure in
activity produced by brain during linguistic active areas of the
electrical activity tasks brain.
in the brain.
Phonemic Paraphasia
• The inability to transmit or receive spoken words, in the
absence of damage to the articulatory production and
reception mechanisms, Stemmer and Whitaker (2008).
• Wernicke area , Berg (2006).
• External capsule area, Hickok (2012).
• Phonemes that occur are consistent with the phonotactic
rules of the speaker’s language.
o addition: butcher → butchler
o deletion: butcher → butcher
o substitution: butcher → betcher
Buckingham HW (1986).
Neologistic paraphasias
• Result of severe phonemic paraphasia.
• Affects content words making them appear bizarre
o “slunker” - toothbrush
• Symptoms includes:
o Neologisms often have certain recurring phonological patterns.
o Pauses before neologisms
o Butterworth (1979)
o Specific mechanism that creates words according to the phonotactic
rules of the language.
o The mechanism is used if a target word is not found within a
specific time.
o This mechanism is then repeated when there are word-finding
problems.
frog frock frossy that is fro that is frabbing is fog is frob
Disturbances of Grammar in Aphasia:
Syndromes, Agrammatism and
Paragrammatism

Wernecke’s Aphasia
Broca’s Aphasia (Paragrammatism)
(Agrammatism)
Lesion
Lesion site:
site: Wernecke’s
Broca’s areaarea in the
in the superior
inferior frontal
temporal
region region
-- Symptoms
Symptoms:(word salad):
i.i. fluent
Sparse(oftentimes nonsense)
speech containing speech.
nouns, main verbs
ii. Lacks semantic coherence.
and adjectives.
iii.Patients
ii. Omittingtend to grammatical
most speak with frequent self- and
morphemes
interruptions, restarts, and (word-finding
functional words.
difficulties).
iv.Grammatical frames appear unaffected.
 Problems in Traditional Theory

• The relationship between comprehension and

production.
• The relationship between agrammatism and
paragrammatism.
 Theories on
Agrammatism

1. Tree-pruning Hypothesis (Syntactic

Trees).
2. Sentence Comprehension: Syntactic
Complexity and Reversibility)
The Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) (Friedmann & Grodzinsky,
1997; Friedmann, 2002).

• Impaired individuals frequently omit or

substitute word-final grammatical markers,
or inflections.
• Walked  walk.
• They claim that the degree of severity of
agrammatic production is pruning in the
syntactic tree
 Sentence Comprehension: Syntactic Complexity
and Reversibility, Meltzer, et al. (2010)

• Irreversible sentences
o The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) was sensitive
to syntactic complexity.
Ex. The boy is burning the paper with a new lighter.

• Reversible sentences
o the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG)
o left precentral gyrus
o right inferior frontal gyrus.
Ex. The boy is tripping the girl in order to win the race.
 Disorders of Lexis

• Anomia, the impairment of the ability to retrieve

words, Stemmer and Whitaker (2008).
Associated with superior temporal sulcus
• Semantic paraphasias: semantically related word
produced instead of the target word (e.g.,
magazine-book). Associated with non-fluent
Broca-type aphasia
• Phonemic paraphasias the produced word is
related to the intended word by sound (e.g., pill-
bill). Associated with fluent Wernicke-type
aphasia.
 The Mental Lexicon

• A knowledge store in the human mind which

functions as a dictionary.
• Single mental lexicon or multiple mental
lexicons?
• Work on acquired dyslexia pointed that
individuals with reading disorders can:
o lose the ability to access words on the basis of
their stored visual forms
o maintain the ability to access the meanings of
words, and the ability to produce them orally.
o The mental lexicon composed of modality-
specific input lexicons as well as modality
specific output lexicons.
• Is it localized in one area in the brain ?
Pragmatic Disorders

• Pragmatic disorders: difficulties using verbal and non-verbal

communication for social purposes:
o Difficulties following rules for conversation and story-telling.
o Difficulties in understanding what is not explicitly stated or what is
ambiguous.
ex. I am cold vs Close the window, please
 • Comprehension involved at least three processing steps,
Stemmer and Whitaker (2008)
o Computing the literal meaning first
Theories o Rejecting it as contextually inappropriate
o Re-interpreting the utterance and arrive at the intended
Attempt to meaning.
Explain • Weak Central Coherence hypothesis (WCCH): refers to
Pragmatic the inability to use context to derive meaning and failure
Language of a central system to integrate small pieces of
information with a globally coherent pattern of
Impairment information.
 Localizing pragmatic disorders
• Before brain imaging
o Individuals with lesions in the right
hemisphere (RHD) have impaired
communicative abilities and well-preserved
linguistic abilities.
• With the technological advancement in
neuroimaging:
o Faust & Mashal (2007) study showed the
involvement of the right hemisphere in the
comprehension of novel but not of
conventional metaphors.
o Bambini (2011): reported an overlapping
network in the classical left language areas for
conventional metaphoric.
 Genetic Specificity and Twin
studies of Language

• Twins share essentially the same pre\post-

natal environment.
• Shared: linguistic input.
• If MONOZYGOTIC (MZ) (genetically
identical) are linguistically more similar than
DIZYGOTIC (DZ) cotwins (genetically
distinct ½), this suggests that genetic factors
play a role in language.
 • Stromswold (2017), performed meta-
analyses of 10 twin studies with written
and spoken language disorders.
• In all 10 studies, similarity rates were
greater for MZ (80%) than DZ (47%)
twin pairs.
• Another study of wide range of linguistic
tasks Stromswold (2017).

Study MZ DZ
Phonemic 0.90 0.56
Awareness
Reading 0.86 0.66
Spelling 0.78 0.48
Vocabulary 0.93 0.76
Development
 MOLECULAR
GENETIC STUDIES OF
LANGUAGE
• Techniques are used to compare the DNA
of
• Language-impaired people and their
normal relatives in large multiplex
families.
• Sibling pairs in which one sibling is
affected and the other is not.
• People with spoken language impairments
the FOXP2-CNTNAP2 mutation has not
been found. Kos, Miriam, et al(2012)
References
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