5.1 Introduction (6:14)

From Professor Marc van Oostendorp's "Miracles of Human Language" course: https://www.coursera.org/course/humanlanguage (October 26 - December 14, 2015 session)

[Miracles of Human Language
An Introduction to Linguistics]

[Module 5: Language in the brain
Video 1: Introduction]

Hi, and welcome to the fifth module of our
course on The Miracles of Human Language,

a module on Language in the Brain.

And this module has been made possible
partly by crowdfunding.

Many of you have contributed
to make another module

and many thanks to all of you:

a module about language in the brain,
that's what we're going to talk about now.

For instance, in this video,
this introductory video,

where I'm going to give you
some background info

and I'm going to explain you more
about what we do in the other videos.

Back in the first module, we established
that language is normally found

in all human beings.

And then we have looked at language
from many different sides

and give many different examples of,
let's say, the software of language.

And now we're going to look
at the hardware of language

the hardware which is mostly in our brain.

So the questions which we're going to ask
is what happens in our heads,

so that we can make and
that we can understand language?

Which are the parts of the brain
which enable this?

And how do these parts work together?

What happens if something goes wrong?

And how does reading work?

We can learn a lot about language
by studying the brain.

The brain is definitely
the most important organ,

maybe for us humans in general,
but especially also for language.

And there are two schools of thought
about the relation

between the brain and language
and the way in which they developed.

You can either think that language --
the way languages work --

has been influenced by the brain:
the brain has made the language.

So languages are the way they are because
our brains happen to be the way they are.

But you can also think that the relation
is the other way around,

that our brains have adapted over
the course of tens of thousands of years

to the fact that we are using language.

And maybe both of them are right.

Now, how do we study this?
How are we going to find out?

The problem with the brain is that
you cannot just ask your informants:

"How does your brain work?"

You can also not feel it for yourself:

"How does my brain work?
I don't feel anything."

So we have to find another way.

Now, remember Labov; Labov said you can
study language in many different places:

you can study it in the library,
you can study it in the closet,

you can study it on the street --

but you can also study it in the lab.

And that's what we're going to do now,

we're going to go to the lab
to study images of the brain,

like so-called MRI pictures,
such as this one,

which give us insight into
the workings of the brain

while we are using language.

And we are going to see
more machines later.

There are two subdisciplines
of linguistics

studying language in the brain.

They are called psycholinguistics
and neurolinguistics.

Psycholinguistics looks at
language in the brain, let's say,

from the outside, by studying
the behavior of people

and neurolinguistics looks at
language in the brain from the inside,

by looking at the brain itself.

Psycholinguistics is the older of the two.

It started in th 19th century, with
psychologists doing small experiments,

like asking people to say
a difficult sentence

and then trying to observe
what they actually said

or by studying diaries of mothers

who were registering the language
development of their children

or diaries of doctors who had patients
with some kind of brain problem,

which seemed to cause problems with
using language or understanding language.

And those are still the kinds of topics
which psycholinguistics studies today.

So, language development,
language comprehension

and language production.

To some extent, those same topics are
studied by neurolinguistics,

but now from the inside,
by looking into the brain,

by asking people to listen to a word
and then make a brain scan

while they are doing so, and in this way,
neurolinguists try to find out

where language is in the brain and
which parts of the brain are used

for producing and understanding language.

Slowly, these two disciplines
are merging together.

They used to be separate, basically,

because if you would put people into
a brain scanner, it was very difficult

to ask them to do complicated things.

But these brain scanners become lighter

and we can now ask people to do tasks
in the brain scanner,

and then we get something which is really
in-between psycho- and neurolinguistics.

Here's a warning.

In this module, there's going to be
less variation in languages

than in our other modules.

And the reasons for this are,
yet again, the machines.

The machines are big, are expensive,
and therefore, we typically find them

in Western countries.

They become smaller,
they become less expensive

and other countries are now also
investing in them,

so we will get more information,
hopefully, about how other languages work.

But so far, we just have to assume that
the brains of all people

work in the same way when using language.

Now, in the next video, we are going
to look deeper into the brain.

We're going to study how your brain works
when you are listening or speaking,

when you are using language.

[Sources:
MRI T2 Brain axial image.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MRI_T2_Brain_axial_image.jpg
Warning icon.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warning_icon.png]

[Miracles of Human Language
An Introduction to Linguistics]

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