[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]
[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]