Language in Our Brain- The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity, 2017
(Foreword by Noam Chomsky)
Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us. We learn it, ... more (Foreword by Noam Chomsky)
Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us. We learn it, we use it, and we seldom
think about it. But once we start thinking about it, language seems like a sheer wonder.
Language is an extremely complex entity with several subcomponents responsible for the
language sound, the word’s meaning, and the grammatical rules governing the relation
between words.
I first realized that there are indeed such subcomponents of language when I worked as a
student in a clinic of language-impaired individuals. On one of my first days in the clinic I
was confronted with a patient who was not able to speak in full sentences. He seemed quite
intelligent, was able to communicate his needs, but did so in utterances in which basically
all grammatical items were missing—similar to a telegram. It immediately occurred to me:
if grammar can fail separately after a brain injury, it must be represented separately in the
brain. This was in 1973. At this time structural brain imaging such as computer tomography
was only about to develop and certainly not yet available in all clinics.
Years later in 1979, when I spent my postdoctoral year at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) and at the Boston Veterans Hospital of the Boston University, the
neurologist Norman Geschwind was one of the first to systematically relate sensory and
cognitive impairments to particular brain sites in vivo by means of computer tomography.
In his clinical seminars he examined a given patient behaviorally and from this predicted
the site of the patient’s brain lesion. Then the computer tomographic picture of the patient’s
brain lesion was presented. Norman Geschwind most of the time had made the correct
prediction, thereby providing impressive evidence for a systematic relation between brain
and behavior.
Today, more than 35 years later, our knowledge about the relationship between brain and
cognitive behavior has dramatically increased due to the advent of new brain imaging techniques
such as functional magnetic resonance tomography. This is in particular true for the
domain of language thanks to studies that were guided and informed by linguistic theory.
Linguistics provides a systematic description of the three relevant language components:
the sound of language, its semantics (dealing with the meaning of words and word combinations),
and its syntax (dealing with the grammatical rules determining the combination
Preface
xii Preface
of words). All these different components have to work together in milliseconds in order
to keep track of online language use. If we want to understand language we first have to
disentangle this complex entity into its relevant pieces—its subcomponents—and then see
how they work together to make language use possible. It is like a mosaic, in that once all
the pieces are in place a coherent picture will evolve.
In Language in Our Brain I will provide a description of the relevant brain systems in
support of language with its subcomponents, how they develop during the first years of
life, and, moreover, how they possibly emerged during evolution.
For this book I drew primarily from empirical data on the language-brain relationship
available in the literature. Parts of it come from articles I have written together with my
students and colleagues. It is the work and discussions with them on which the view laid
down here is built. My thanks go to all who have been working with me over the years.
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Books by Rodrigo Ribeiro
Having outlined a cartographic model of language, I can now address the
point at the heart of this book: different languages carve up and map experiential
state-space in different ways.* For as the world’s cultures and countries
have developed language systems, they have had cause to create subtly
different configurations of boundaries. This in turn affects how people in
those cultures experience and understand the world. This claim has come
to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us. We learn it, we use it, and we seldom
think about it. But once we start thinking about it, language seems like a sheer wonder.
Language is an extremely complex entity with several subcomponents responsible for the
language sound, the word’s meaning, and the grammatical rules governing the relation
between words.
I first realized that there are indeed such subcomponents of language when I worked as a
student in a clinic of language-impaired individuals. On one of my first days in the clinic I
was confronted with a patient who was not able to speak in full sentences. He seemed quite
intelligent, was able to communicate his needs, but did so in utterances in which basically
all grammatical items were missing—similar to a telegram. It immediately occurred to me:
if grammar can fail separately after a brain injury, it must be represented separately in the
brain. This was in 1973. At this time structural brain imaging such as computer tomography
was only about to develop and certainly not yet available in all clinics.
Years later in 1979, when I spent my postdoctoral year at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) and at the Boston Veterans Hospital of the Boston University, the
neurologist Norman Geschwind was one of the first to systematically relate sensory and
cognitive impairments to particular brain sites in vivo by means of computer tomography.
In his clinical seminars he examined a given patient behaviorally and from this predicted
the site of the patient’s brain lesion. Then the computer tomographic picture of the patient’s
brain lesion was presented. Norman Geschwind most of the time had made the correct
prediction, thereby providing impressive evidence for a systematic relation between brain
and behavior.
Today, more than 35 years later, our knowledge about the relationship between brain and
cognitive behavior has dramatically increased due to the advent of new brain imaging techniques
such as functional magnetic resonance tomography. This is in particular true for the
domain of language thanks to studies that were guided and informed by linguistic theory.
Linguistics provides a systematic description of the three relevant language components:
the sound of language, its semantics (dealing with the meaning of words and word combinations),
and its syntax (dealing with the grammatical rules determining the combination
Preface
xii Preface
of words). All these different components have to work together in milliseconds in order
to keep track of online language use. If we want to understand language we first have to
disentangle this complex entity into its relevant pieces—its subcomponents—and then see
how they work together to make language use possible. It is like a mosaic, in that once all
the pieces are in place a coherent picture will evolve.
In Language in Our Brain I will provide a description of the relevant brain systems in
support of language with its subcomponents, how they develop during the first years of
life, and, moreover, how they possibly emerged during evolution.
For this book I drew primarily from empirical data on the language-brain relationship
available in the literature. Parts of it come from articles I have written together with my
students and colleagues. It is the work and discussions with them on which the view laid
down here is built. My thanks go to all who have been working with me over the years.