5.1 Introduction (6:14)

These are the Coursera-provided English subtitles: please don't edit them.

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

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

Human Language,
a module of language in the brain.

And this module has been made
possible partly by crowd funding.

Many you have contributed to make another
module, and many thanks to all of you.

A module about language and 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 to 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

given 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
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's two schools of sort 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
adopted 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're going to see
more of 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 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 the 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 seem to

cause problems with using language or
understanding language.

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

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're 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
between phyco and neuro linguistics.

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 brain of all people

work in the same way when using language.

Now, in the next video,
we're 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.