Language and the Brain - Mapping the Healthy Human Brain

11 important questions on Language and the Brain - Mapping the Healthy Human Brain

What does a "functional magnetic resonance imaging" (fMRI) scan do?

It is not measuring brain activity directly. It's using magnetic fields differences to detect and record normal physiological differences in oxygen-rich blood versus oxygen poor-blood

Besides from PET being a useful research tool, what is the downside of this neuroimaging technique?

It is risky as it is requiring exposure to radiation.

What is a reasonable strategy for isolating the language areas during a brain scan?

Come up with a comparison condition that is as similar as possible to the target stimulus except that it doesn't require language. The brain regions that show activity above the control task can then more plausibly be attributed to the linguistic aspect of the stimulus.
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What would make the difference between recognizing words and language production more logical, according to Hickok and Poeppel (2007)?

Seeing these two tasks as belongings to different language-related networks.

What explains the theory that simple speech perception tasks can be more directly connected to impairment in language production than to difficulties in understanding the meanings of words?

Performing tasks like identifying individual syllables lean more heavily on a different network that maps the acoustic information about sounds onto the articulatory gestures that produce them (the kind of mapping that babies learn when babbling and making meaningless sounds)

What happens if you forgot the phone number of a family member?


you’ve directly experienced the disconnect that can happen between the two kinds of memory (declarative and procedural).

With what are the dorsal pathways involved, as it seems to be?

Information that’s relevant for the detailed processing of sounds, the planning of articulation, and the repetition of words

What is the specialization of the ventral pathways when it comes to the information given to the brain?

Information about word meanings; damage to these connections, for example, can lead to trouble in understanding the meanings of words or in retrieving words from memory.

What does the "the white matter" do in the brain?


White matter is like the brain’s road networks, allowing products from one processing area to be sent to another area for further processing or packaging. (The average 20-year-old
human possesses between 150,000 and 175,000 kilometers of white matter fibers, as estimated by Lisbeth Marner, 2003)

How can white fiber tracts be visualized in the living brain?

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), which tracks how water molecules diffuse through the brain, providing a view of the brain’s “white matter highway.”

For what purpose did Dronkers and Turken use the dMRI method?

To map out the white matter pathways that connect the various regions that had previously been found to be important for sentence comprehension.

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