Synopsis

Human communication is vastly more complex than that of any other species we know about. It is so complex that linguists are only just beginning to identify the processes in the brain that are related to understanding language. This unit looks at how language is understood by taking an interdisciplinary approach.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Learning outcomes
1 Overview
2.1 Preliminaries
2.2 Generativity and duality of patterning
2.3 From ear to phoneme: the phonological problem
2.4 From phoneme to meaning: the semantic problem
2.5 From phoneme to sentence structure: the syntactic problem
2.6 Summary of Section 2
3.1 Speech perception
3.2 The anatomy of the language system
3.3 Specialisation within language areas: aphasia
3.4 Specialisation within language areas: brain scanning
3.5 Electrophysiological studies of language processing
3.6 Summary of Section 3
4 Conclusions
5 Questions and answers
Next steps
Acknowledgements

 

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