neurolinguistics for different components of language

Neurolinguistics for different components of language

HOW LANGUAGE DISORDER AFFECTS THE FOLLOWING ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

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Phonology

Morphology and syntax

Question for the forum: Why do you think this topic is relevant to a language teacher?

Lexical semantics

Syndromes and symptoms in aphasia

Left-hemisphere lesions

Right-hemisphere lesions

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READ ABOUT IT IN: Alshen, E. (2006) Introduction to Neurolinguistics. USA: John Benjamins

Phonology in neurolinguistics

Aphasia is characterised by the occurrence ofPhonological paraphasias and neologisms

Phonemic (and to some extent semantic) paraphasias (substitutions, etc., of phonemes) and neologisms (newly made-up words) are produced especially often in Wernicke’s aphasia, but also in other forms of aphasia

What are these?

Phoneme paraphasia: addition: butcher → butchler deletion: butcher → buter substitution: butcher → betcher Word paraphasia: form-based: butcher → bitch meaning-based: butcher → grocer unrelated: butcher → train

EXAMPLES

Example: Utterance by a person with Wernicke’s aphasia/jargon aphasia containing many neologisms "a frog frock frossy that is fro that is frabbing is fog is frob"

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Morphology and syntax in neurolinguistics

Disturbances of grammar in aphasia: agrammatism, and paragrammatism

PARAGRAMMATISM frequent self-interruptions, restarts, and circumlocutions, caused by their anomic problems (word-finding difficulties). a relative lack of nouns in particular, but also of adjectives and main verbs and with substitutions of grammatical morphemes

What are these?

AGRAMMATISM: In Broca’s aphasia; characterized by nonfluent speech. grammar is often very sparse, and agrammatic. very short, simple sentences or even shorter structures mainly containing nouns, main verbs and adjectives, but omitting most grammatical morphemes (such as noun and verb inflections) and so-called function words (conjunctions, articles, etc.).

Disturbances in

Syntax 1. Agrammatism (defined only by short phrase length and slow speech rate) seems to exist in most languages and is usually combined with reduced variety in syntax. 2. There is great variation between languages, but a selective vulnerability of grammatical inflections and function words can be found in all aphasics, according to Bates and Wulfeck (1989) (who advocate a type of morpholexical interpretation of agrammatism). 3. A substantial number of main verbs are omitted. Many studies give verbs a central role in the formation of the syntactic structure of utterances

Morphology 1. Free grammatical morphemes (e.g., function words) tend to be omitted, but they are sometimes substituted as well. 2. Bound grammatical morphemes (e.g., inflectional endings) are rarely omitted, but are often substituted.

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Morphology and syntax in neurolinguistics

Morphological and syntactic complexity interaction

Morphological and syntactic complexity interact in making a grammatical structure hard to process. Processing conditions seem to matter in that a. simplification is attempted, and b. complex structures tend to break down and contain many errors. This points to “access problems” as a likely underlying cause.

(Little Red Riding Hood) Red Riding Hood–pretty girl. Mother grandmother /stik/ … um home, uh forest … uh wolf .. um eat … us . Grandmother … uh. Eat . g-grandmother . uh wolves–wolf eat grandmother, Uh Riding Hood, pretty girl, basket, uh uh (sighs) you know? “Pretty girl” … Uh … likes grandmother’s voice, uh noodles … (laughs). ‘n likes uh Riding Hood–uh memory–uh–looks uh voice, looks . uh dress, looks, bed, uh looks … uh … uh … Riding Hood … Riding Hood … (Extracted and adapted from Menn & Obler, 1990a, p. 168)

Example of agrammatic speech

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Lexical semantics

The typical disturbance in lexical semantics is called Anomia

Anomia creates problems in tasks such as naming objects (visually displayed, from verbal descriptions, or from memory)

What is Anomia

EXAMPLE

Picture naming by person with anomia Target word: LADDER A: yes there we have it there… he had one of those yesterday the one who picked apples I know so well what it’s called we have one over there by the shed no cannot Target word: SHOEMAKER A: carpen … no it isn’t that shoebake … shoebaker, no carpen carpen T: shoemake … A: shoebaker T: no shoemake … A: shoemaker

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Syndromes and symptoms in aphasia

Aphasiacs often manifest the following symptoms and syndroms

Persons with deep dyslexia are usually unable to read by grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (i.e., sound out the words), and therefore have to rely on their visual and semantic abilities to identify words; at the same time, they make these interesting types of errors.

Deep dyslexia:

Category-specific anomia:

A person has an anomia that affects a certain category of words, but leaves other categories unaffected.

Right-hemisphere lesions and lexical-semantic problems:

Subjects mainly have problems with divergent language tasks, for example, verbal fluency tasks, where the subject is asked to name as many members of a category as possible in a minute, naming categories for a number of objects, and determining whether two items are related.

This is a specific disorder that affects certain specified semantic information about categories, while superordinate information can still be activated (e.g., animal for dog).

Semantic dementia:

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The semantics and pragmatics of communicative contributions in context Aphasia, especially after left-hemisphere lesions

Aphasia patients, especially after left-hemisphere lesions may:

Have difficulties handling logico-grammatical structures; Have problems with metaphor interpretation, inference, abstraction in general, or decontextualization, and, in some cases, difficulties affecting body communication. Have pragmatic problems such as the apparent violation of conversational principles and conventional patterns of interaction (consequence of aphasia affecting other aspects of language such as word finding, word mobilization, and comprehension of words and structures) Have language problems which are typically of the semantic-pragmatic kind and affect, for example, inferencing, metaphor comprehension, and logico-grammatical structures

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The semantics and pragmatics of communicative contributions in context Aphasia, especially after right-hemisphere lesions

Aphasia patients, especially after right -hemisphere lesions may:

Manifest left neglect, or a reduced awareness of and responsivity toward the left side, most often visually, can interfere with reading, writing, spatial orientation, and the selective direction of attention to the most significant stimuli. Show hypo-arousal, that is, a generally reduced responsivity and a narrowed focus of attention, can also reduce general attention. Have prosodic deficits, problems interpreting intonation contours (pitch) and stress in utterances, in particular, naturally leading to comprehension difficulties. Have lexical-semantic deficits which can cause communication problems, affecting not only the comprehension and production of single words, but also the communication of longer units in interaction. The more “peripheral,” connotative, or infrequent meanings used to resolve ambiguities, understand inferences, metaphors, etc., and adapt flexibly to the situation as a whole are vulnerable in RHD persons and this is directly relevant to their semantic-pragmatic ability. Have word-finding and word-comprehension problems, which of course, also affect interaction patterns. Lose emotional information, affecting not only emotional prosody and facial expression, but also verbal expression of emotions. Have discourse deficits: problems managing complex communication situations understanding speaker intentions and communicative acts, especially indirect ones, occur. Have attention and integration problems leading to lack of selective focus and integration of information. Alternative meanings, inferences, and metaphors can cause problems. This shows up as problems understanding humor, irony, etc. Social communicative problems often result from these symptoms.

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