Neurolinguistics

 by Lise Menn

Neurolinguistics is the study of how language is represented in the brain: that is, how and where our brains store our knowledge of the language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write, what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our everyday lives. Neurolinguists try to answer questions like these: What about our brains makes human language possible – why is our communication system so elaborate and so different from that of other animals? Does language use the same kind of neural computation as other cognitive systems, such as music or mathematics? Where in your brain is a word that you've learned? How does a word ‘come to mind’ when you need it (and why does it sometimes not come to you?)

If you know two languages, how do you switch between them and how do you keep them from interfering with each other? If you learn two languages from birth, how is your brain different from the brain of someone who speaks only one language, and why? Is the left side of your brain really ‘the language side’? If you lose the ability to talk or to read because of a stroke or other brain injury, how well can you learn to talk again? What kinds of therapy are known to help, and what new kinds of language therapy look promising? Do people who read languages written from left to right (like English or Spanish) have language in a different place 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 instead of an alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese? If you're dyslexic, in what way is your brain different from the brain of someone who has no trouble reading? How about if you stutter?

As you can see, neurolinguistics is deeply entwined with psycholinguistics, which is the study of the language processing steps that are required for speaking and understanding words and sentences, learning first and later languages, and also of language processing in disorders of speech, language, and reading. Information about these disorders is available from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA), at http://www.asha.org/public/.