Grammar
Let me start today’s article by telling you about Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman who, in 1848, had a three-and-a-half-foot long tamping iron rod driven completely through his head to then land fifty yards away from him. This was a rather spectacular event and most of us would probably assume that no one could recover from it. Well, Phineas did survive, however. Although his friends and family observed some changes in his behaviour, no apparent damage to his senses or speech could be determined and Mr Gage’s language abilities remained unaffected. Looking at his damage we can safely assume that wherever the language ability is located in the brain, it certainly isn’t in the left frontal lobe. We will then talk about tongue tips and slips and how these are being considered possible clues to the way linguistic knowledge is organised within our brain.
"Scalpel sister, we’re taking the brain apart"
Let’s forget about the right hemisphere for the time being and discuss where particular language abilities are located in the left hemisphere. We know this as, since Phineas’s time, a number of discoveries have been made and because people who had damage to those specific areas of brain then accordingly had also language disabilities. These areas are as follows:
Broca’s area – crucially involved in speech production
Wernicke’s area – understanding of speech
The articulate fascilus – a bundle of nerve fibres connecting Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area
The motor cortex – controls the articulatory muscles of the larynx, tongue, jaw and face
Tips and slips of the tongue
Behind the brain structure and the way our linguistic knowledge is organised within it, there are possible clues to why occasional speech production difficulties occur. We all experience them every now and then and perhaps more often after a night out. I bet you know the phenomenon when you feel like you know the word but it just won’t come to you when you want to use it. You might even have an accurate phonological outline, you might know the initial letters and how long the word is. This partial recollection you have suggests that our word-bank is partially organised on the basis of some phonological and semantic information while some items are trickier to be retrieved than others. Sometimes when you finally seem to remember the word you articulate it only just to find that you got it wrong while there are often strong similarities between the target word and the mistake. These are normally referred to as malapropisms, after Mrs Malaprop in a play by Sheridan who constantly produced near-misses for words.
A similar type of speech production difficulty is the slip-of-the-tongue, also known as Spoonerism after an Anglican clergyman, Rev. William Spooner. Most of our slips involve interchange of two initial sounds in a phrase. Sometimes this might be done for comical effect like in memorable quote by Oscar Wilde Works in the course of the drinking classes. It has been argued that slips of the tongue aren’t random and that they indicate the existence of different stages in articulation of linguistic expressions and that our brain slips first failing at organising the message in the correct order before it gets out of our mouths. Sometimes we can also experience so-called slips-of-the-ear in which we mishear a word or phrase which would analogically suggest that the brain tries to make sense of the auditory signal it receives and again, occasionally fails at it.
- I Are Hulk, I Has No Grammar
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- Why Do We Swear?
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- Vowels And Consonants
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- Cohesion
There are two ways of telling something to somebody. A long one and a short one. You can easily measure the size of it by the pause that one takes after they say to you: 'I must tell you something...'. If it's going to be a good or neutral...
- Phones, Phonemes And Allophones.
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Grammar
Language and the brain
Let me start today’s article by telling you about Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman who, in 1848, had a three-and-a-half-foot long tamping iron rod driven completely through his head to then land fifty yards away from him. This was a rather spectacular event and most of us would probably assume that no one could recover from it. Well, Phineas did survive, however. Although his friends and family observed some changes in his behaviour, no apparent damage to his senses or speech could be determined and Mr Gage’s language abilities remained unaffected. Looking at his damage we can safely assume that wherever the language ability is located in the brain, it certainly isn’t in the left frontal lobe. We will then talk about tongue tips and slips and how these are being considered possible clues to the way linguistic knowledge is organised within our brain.
"Scalpel sister, we’re taking the brain apart"
Let’s forget about the right hemisphere for the time being and discuss where particular language abilities are located in the left hemisphere. We know this as, since Phineas’s time, a number of discoveries have been made and because people who had damage to those specific areas of brain then accordingly had also language disabilities. These areas are as follows:
Broca’s area – crucially involved in speech production
Wernicke’s area – understanding of speech
The articulate fascilus – a bundle of nerve fibres connecting Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area
The motor cortex – controls the articulatory muscles of the larynx, tongue, jaw and face
Tips and slips of the tongue
Behind the brain structure and the way our linguistic knowledge is organised within it, there are possible clues to why occasional speech production difficulties occur. We all experience them every now and then and perhaps more often after a night out. I bet you know the phenomenon when you feel like you know the word but it just won’t come to you when you want to use it. You might even have an accurate phonological outline, you might know the initial letters and how long the word is. This partial recollection you have suggests that our word-bank is partially organised on the basis of some phonological and semantic information while some items are trickier to be retrieved than others. Sometimes when you finally seem to remember the word you articulate it only just to find that you got it wrong while there are often strong similarities between the target word and the mistake. These are normally referred to as malapropisms, after Mrs Malaprop in a play by Sheridan who constantly produced near-misses for words.
A similar type of speech production difficulty is the slip-of-the-tongue, also known as Spoonerism after an Anglican clergyman, Rev. William Spooner. Most of our slips involve interchange of two initial sounds in a phrase. Sometimes this might be done for comical effect like in memorable quote by Oscar Wilde Works in the course of the drinking classes. It has been argued that slips of the tongue aren’t random and that they indicate the existence of different stages in articulation of linguistic expressions and that our brain slips first failing at organising the message in the correct order before it gets out of our mouths. Sometimes we can also experience so-called slips-of-the-ear in which we mishear a word or phrase which would analogically suggest that the brain tries to make sense of the auditory signal it receives and again, occasionally fails at it.
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- I Are Hulk, I Has No Grammar
Some people tend to think that knowledge of vocabulary is key to being able to speak a foreign language and that grammar is of less importance. Let me tell you that this isn’t true. We use grammar in everyday speech, whether we want to or not. If...
- Why Do We Swear?
Why do we get upset about swear words? The expression of profane language has been the main legal battleground of free speech for the last century. You can easily switch on your TV any night during the week and hear comedians impugning the competency...
- Vowels And Consonants
There are two types of meaning associated with the words 'vowel' and 'consonant'. First, the phonological definition says that consonants are simply those segments that occur at the edges of syllables, unlike vowels which occur at the...
- Cohesion
There are two ways of telling something to somebody. A long one and a short one. You can easily measure the size of it by the pause that one takes after they say to you: 'I must tell you something...'. If it's going to be a good or neutral...
- Phones, Phonemes And Allophones.
The terminology we will be dealing with today may strike you as really complicated. This is always the case with abstract units that you cannot see or touch. I've made every effort for the text to be simple so don't give up before you even try...