LINGUISTICS WEB QUIZ

LINGUISTICS 1, WEB QUIZ #7 1. BRAIN FUNCTION LATERALIZATION 2. DIRECT OBSERVATION OF THE BRAIN 3. SPLIT BRAIN STUDIES 4. PROBING OF THE BRAIN 5. DICHOTIC LISTENING 6. LANGUAGE PROCESSING RESEARCH: LDT 7. LANGUAGE PROCESSING RESEARCH: ERP 8. TYPES OF APHASIA I: BROCA 9. TYPES OF APHASIA II: WERNICKE 10. PARALLELS IN DESIGN OF ASL AND SPEECH

1. BRAIN FUNCTION AND LATERALIZATION Some people like to listen to instrumental music when they read, whereas other people cannot have music of any kind playing when they read, finding that it distracts them from the content of the reading. Given what we know about the way cognitive functions are distributed in the brain, WHAT WOULD BE THE MOST LIKELY EXPLANATION FOR WHY SOME PEOPLE HAVE DIFFICULTY IN READING AND LISTENING TO MUSIC AT THE SAME TIME? a. The brain has trouble doing two cognitive tasks at once. b. The same part of the brain is trying to do two cognitive processes at the same time. c. The left and right hemispheres are competing for the person’s attention. d. Those who learned to play music and learned to read at about the same time were trained to use the same part of the brain for each of these functions. This interference does not arise for those who learn to read before they learned music or vice versa. e. Those who are distracted are unconsciously try to set the words that they are reading as lyrics to the music that they are hearing. 2. DIRECT OBSERVATION OF THE BRAIN Click the link “Videos for Quiz 7” below the quiz prompt and watch video for question 2. This is a clip from a longer YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK29RAKDzf8 narrated by Joy Hirsch of Columbia University, who uses Functional Magnetic Imaging (fMRI) of the brain as it does various cognitive tasks. (fMRI imaging measures oxygen flow to tissues, whereas MRI alone relies primarily on water molecules.) The most active areas of the brain are highlighted in red. In (a-e) are several images from the video. Which ONE is most likely to show the brain engaged PRIMARILY in language processing? NOTE: IN THESE IMAGES THE LEFT HEMISPHERE IS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE IMAGE AND THE FRONT OF THE HEAD IS AT THE TOP

3. SPLIT BRAIN STUDIES Click the link “Videos for Quiz 7” below the quiz prompt and watch video for question 3. This is a clip from a longer YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo that shows the same split-brain subject, Joe, that we saw (clearly filmed at a much later time) as part of the lecture on language and the brain.

Why did Joe draw a saw with his left hand even though he said he saw a hammer? a. His drawing hand is using the information that came to that hand from his brain. b. Joe draws rather clumsily with his left hand, suggesting that he is right handed. He probably lost his concentration as he tried the difficult task of drawing with his left hand. c. The image of the saw reached his right hemisphere more quickly than the image of the hammer reached his left hemisphere. d. The image of the hammer first had to go to the left hemisphere, then cross back to the right hemisphere, which conrols his left hand, whereas the image of the saw went straight to his right hemisphere. e. The picture of the saw was on left side of the screen, that is, the side of his drawing hand. 4. PROBING THE BRAIN In the lecture on the brain and language, we saw a case of a man who had a tumor covering part of the left hemisphere of the brain and the difficulty of surgically removing such a tumor while inflicting miminum damage to the cognitive processes to that area of the brain. Here is a selection fom the same article that decribes the man's linguistic abilities after his surgery to remove the tumor:

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING DOES INFORMATION FROM THE ARTICLE NOT SUPPORT WITH REGARD TO PLACEMENT OF LANGUAGE IN THE BRAIN? a. Different parts of the brain control vocabulary (=lexicon) and grammar. b. Vocabulary (=lexicon) in the brain is organized in such a way that related items are grouped together and unrelated items are grouped separately. c. Language abilities and motor abilities (that allow us to move our articulators to produce sounds) are controlled by the same part of the brain. d. Words of different grammatical categories (Noun, Adjective, etc.) are accessed independently of one another. e. The ability to linguistically name concepts takes place independently of our ability to recognize concepts and physical entities in the world. 5. DICHOTIC LISTENING Click the link “Videos for Quiz 7” below the quiz prompt and watch video for question 5. This is a little dichotic listening demo posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAXV6APZVQI You can look at a transcript I what I THINK was played to each ear as I listened to the stimuli separately. QUESTION: Assuming that a dichotic listening experiment gives reliable results, WHICH OF THE STATEMENTS BEST STATES WHAT A DICHOTIC LISTENING EXPERIMENT SHOWS? a. This experiment shows that the brain is not able to process two signals simultaneously. b. This experiment shows that delivering different stimuli simultaneously to the two ears creates a conflict such that the subject just hears linguistic "noise" rather than identifiable words. c. This experiment shows that right handed people prefer the stimuli played in the right ear, and left handed people prefer the stimuli played in the left ear. d. Each subject consistently prefers the stimuli played in one ear over the stimuli played in the other ear. This shows that there are between-subject differences in where language is processed. e. This experiment shows that the two hemispheres must process auditory stimuli differently, causing the subject to have a bias towards what they hear in one ear over what they hear in the other ear