Neurolinguistics

Lise Menn
What Is Neurolinguistics About?

Where in your brain is a word that you've learned? If you know two languages, are they
stored in two different parts of your brain? Is the left side of your brain really the
language side? If you lose the ability to talk because of a stroke, can you learn to
talk again?
Do people who read languages written from left to right (like English) think
differently from people who read languages written from right to left (like Hebrew and
Arabic)? What about if you read a language that is written using some other kind of
symbols, like Chinese or Japanese? If you're dyslexic, is your brain different from the
brain of someone who has no trouble reading?
All of these questions and more are what neurolinguistics is about. Techniques like
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) are used
to study language in the brain, and they are constantly being improved. We can see
finer and finer details of the brain's constantly changing blood flow—where the blood
flows fastest, the brain is most active. We can see more and more accurate traces of
our electrical brain waves and understand more about how they reflect our responses to
statements that are true or false, ungrammatical or nonsense, and how the brain's
electrical activity varies depending on whether we are listening to nouns or verbs,
words about colors, or words about numbers. New information about neurolinguistics is
regularly covered in national news sources.

Where Is Language in the Brain?

Brain activity is like the activity of a huge city. A city is organized so that people
who live in it can get what they need to live on, but you can't say that a complex
activity, like manufacturing a product, is 'in' one place. Raw materials have to
arrive, subcontractors are needed, the product must be shipped out in various
directions. It's the same with our brains. We can't say that all of language is 'in' a
particular part of the brain; it's not even true that a particular word is 'in' just
one spot in a person's brain. But we can say that listening, understanding, talking,
and reading each involve activities in certain parts of the brain much more than other
parts.
Most of these parts are in the left side of your brain, the left hemisphere, regardless
of what language you read and how it is written. We know this because aphasia (language
loss due to brain damage) is almost always due to left hemisphere injury in people who
speak and read Hebrew, English, Chinese, or Japanese, and also in people who are
illiterate. But areas in the right side are essential for communicating effectively and
for understanding the point of what people are saying. If you are bilingual, your right
hemisphere may be somewhat more involved in your second language than it is in your
first language.
Are All Human Brains Organized in the Same Way?
The organization of your brain is similar to other peoples' because we almost all move,
hear, see, and so on in essentially the same way. But our individual experiences and
training also affect the organization of our brains—for example, deaf people understand
sign language using just about the same parts of their brains that hearing people do
for spoken language.

Aphasia and Dyslexia

What is aphasia like? Is losing language the reverse of learning it? People who have
lost some or most of their language because of brain damage are not like children.
Using language involves many kinds of knowledge and skill; some can be badly damaged
while others remain in fair condition. People with aphasia have different combinations
of things they can still do in an adult-like way plus things that they now do clumsily
or not at all. Therapy can help them to regain lost skills and make the best use of
remaining abilities. Adults who have had brain damage and become aphasic recover more
slowly than children who have had the same kind of damage, but they continue to improve
over decades if they have good language stimulation.
What about dyslexia, and children who have trouble learning to talk even though they
can hear normally? There probably are brain differences that account for their
difficulties, and research in this area is moving rapidly. Since brains can change with
training much more than we used to think, there is renewed hope for effective therapy
for people with disorders of reading and language.