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[Miracles of Human Language
An Introduction to Linguistics]

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

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

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a module on Language in the Brain.

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And this module has been made possible
partly by crowdfunding.

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Many of you have contributed 
to make another module

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and many thanks to all of you:

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

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For instance, in this video, 
this introductory video,

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where I'm going to give you 
some background info

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

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

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in all human beings.

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And then we have looked at language
from many different sides

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

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

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the hardware which is mostly in our brain.

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

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

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Which are the parts of the brain 
which enable this?

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And how do these parts work together?

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What happens if something goes wrong?

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And how does reading work?

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

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The brain is definitely 
the most important organ,

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

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And there are two schools of thought
about the relation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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to the fact that we are using language.

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And maybe both of them are right.

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

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

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"How does your brain work?"

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You can also not feel it for yourself:

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

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So we have to find another way.

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

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

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you can study it on the street --

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but you can also study it in the lab.

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

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

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

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which give us insight into 
the workings of the brain

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while we are using language.

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And we are going to see 
more machines later.

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There are two subdisciplines 
of linguistics

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studying language in the brain.

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They are called psycholinguistics
and neurolinguistics.

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

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from the outside, by studying
the behavior of people

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

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by looking at the brain itself.

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Psycholinguistics is the older of the two.

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

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like asking people to say 
a difficult sentence

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and then trying to observe 
what they actually said

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or by studying diaries of mothers

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who were registering the language 
development of their children

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

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

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

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So, language development, 
language comprehension

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and language production.

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

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

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

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

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

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for producing and understanding language.

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Slowly, these two disciplines 
are merging together.

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They used to be separate, basically,

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

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to ask them to do complicated things.

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But these brain scanners become lighter

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

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

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Here's a warning.

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

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than in our other modules.

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

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

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in Western countries.

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They become smaller, 
they become less expensive

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and other countries are now also
investing in them,

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

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

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work in the same way when using language.

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

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

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when you are using language.

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[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]

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[Miracles of Human Language
An Introduction to Linguistics]

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[This video by Leiden University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlik 3.0 Netherlands License (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en_US). Contact: mooc@cdh.leidenuniv.nl]