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Description
Module Content
This course aims to provide an introduction to the neuroscience of language with a focus on the contributions from linguistic theory. The goal of the neuroscience of language is to understand how language is represented and processed in the brain. The module discusses primary research articles organized by weekly topics according to levels of linguistic analysis (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics).听
Teaching Delivery
10 weekly ~2hr lectures and 1hr tutorials. The tutorials are led by a postgraduate teaching assistant and provide both practice using terminology from lecture and application of the topic to additional languages, paradigms or linguistic distinctions.
Indicative Topics (NB: not all topics will be covered every year):
鈥� Introduction to neurophysiology, neuroanatomy and neuroimaging techniques
鈥� Neuroimaging of speech processing and evidence for phonemic analysis
鈥� Semantic Dementia: Evidence for an amodal region representing concepts
鈥� Neuroimaging evidence for timing and location of lexical access
鈥� Priming paradigm and neuroimaging evidence for morphological processing
鈥� Aphasia evidence for localization of sentence comprehension and production
鈥� Neuroimaging: Relationship between Sentence comprehension and Executive Function?
鈥� Neuroimaging and computational model evidence for hierarchical structure in sentence processing
鈥� The Bilingual Brain
Learning Objectives
Identify key anatomical structures in the brain relevant to language processing; compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques for studying brain-language relations (i.e., lesion, fMRI, ERP); awareness of language processing paradigms (eg, lexical decision, masked priming, odd-ball); describe key neurolinguistic findings (e.g., the where and when of: phonemic vs acoustic processing, morphological vs semantic priming); and understand the neurolinguistic theories that account for the data (e.g., Decompositional vs Associationism, Tree Pruning Hypothesis, Trace Deletion Hypothesis).
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 19th August 2024.
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