International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-1, Issue-1 , Nov-Dec- 2016

ISSN: 2456-7250

Processing Language via Brain

University of Kufa, Department of English, Najaf, Iraq

Abstract—This paper examines language processing in systems. These synergies are needed for imitation
the human brain and, more specifically, what happens to learning of rapid gestural sequences for speech production
spoken language when certain areas of the brain are and perception.
damaged. Language processing is what takes place Language is used not only to convey our thoughts and
whenever we understand or produce speech; a normal feelings to others, but also to represent them to ourselves.
task, but one of extraordinary complexity, whose But thinking is not equivalent to talking to oneself, and
mysteries have baffled some of the greatest minds across the linguistic expressions with which we clothe our
the centuries. thoughts are merely signposts to meaning, not explicit
Keywords—neuro-linguistics, brain, aphasia and representations of those meanings. Linguistic expressions
language. are under-determined with respect to the message the
speaker intends to convey.
I. INTRODUCTION 1-2 Language in the brain:
Neuro-linguistics studies the relationship of language and Language is predominantly lateralized to the left
communication to different aspects of brain function, i.e. hemisphere in the vast majority of people, even the
it tries to explore how the brain understands and produces majority of left-handers. While the functional
language and communication. It studies how the brain asymmetries of the left and right hemispheres are well
enables us to produce language. Neurologist studies known and have been
nervous systems and brain, he contribute to the field of much debated in the popular and technical literature
neuro-linguistics study human neurology and how anatomically, the structures of the brain appear to be quite
behavior breaks down after damage to the brain and symmetrical.
nervous system. But the one known region where a structural asymmetry
Neuro-linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that more has been found occurs in the planum temporale, which is
disciplines contribute to it than those its name proclaims. part of Wernicke’s area, the second language area, known
psycholinguistics is participated in neuro-linguistics after its discoverer Karl Wernicke in 1874. The planum
study, psycholinguist studies how language is processed temporale of the left temporal lobe was found to be larger
in normal individual while Neuropsychologist studies the than its right hemisphere counterpart in 84 per cent of
breakdown of cognitive abilities result from brain cases. The reason why this rather unique asymmetry was
damage. not observed by previous generations of anatomists,
The term Neuro-linguistics is a new field, it can be trace though it is quite visible to the naked eye, is that the
back the 19th century, in that time a physician named Paul planum temporal is located within the fold of the sylvian
Broca who noticed the correlation between language fissure, out of sight from surface inspection of the
disturbance and resulting from brain damage, he temporal lobe.
recognized also that a certain area on the left surface of
the brain is responsible for language. He was involved in
forming the Anthropological Society in Paris. Despite its
root in the 19th century, Neuro-linguistics must be seen as
relatively new science. It is new compared to sciences like
physics and chemistry whose practitioners have worked
out a substantial fact base and accepted theories to explain
and study the facts.
1-1Function of language:
Our concern is primarily with language comprehension
and its disorders. However, the neural mechanisms that
the brain has evolved for language processing are based,
at least in part, upon novel synergies that have evolved
between the motor control and the auditory perceptual

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International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-1, Issue-1 , Nov-Dec- 2016
ISSN: 2456-7250
1-3 Evolution of language and the brain: construction to represent that object. Once the germ of a
It is uncontroversial, in scientific circles at least, that the representational system has implanted itself in the
human brain has undergone very rapid growth in recent mind/brain, there is no quarantining its spread to the
evolution. The brain has doubled in size in less than one whole realm of imaginable experience. This is evident
million years. The cause of this ‘runaway’ growth (Wills, from the period of
1993) is a matter of conjecture and endless debate. A explosive vocabulary growth that occurs in normal human
strong case can be made that the expansion of the brain infants around two to three years of age, for which there
was a consequence of the development of spoken is no parallel in even the most loquacious of the signing
language and the survival advantage that possessing a chimps that have been studied. The voracious growth of a
language confers. The areas of the brain that underwent representational system is also movingly illustrated in the
greatest development appear to be specifically associated diary of Helen Keller, the remarkable woman, rendered
with language: the frontal lobes and the junction of the blind and deaf in infancy, who suddenly discovered the
parietal, occipital and temporal lobes (the POT junction – representational function of tactile signs at an age when
more of this later). she was old enough to consciously appreciate their
It is easy, perhaps all too easy, to reconstruct plausible communicative significance. Everything suddenly
scenarios illustrating the survival advantages that required a name.
possession of a hands-free auditory/vocal means of While the origins of language remain obscure, the co-
communication with the symbolic power to represent evolution hypothesis claims that once the seeds of a
almost any imaginable situation would confer on a social symbolic representational system were sown, the brain
group. Perhaps it was the superior linguistic abilities of responded with a vigorous and unprecedented increase in
homosapiens, with brains and vocal tracts better adapted its processing and storage capacity. According to the co-
for speech and language, that led to the rapid evolution hypothesis, the brain as a system which
displacement and extinction of the Neanderthals in supports representational computation cannot remain ‘a
Europe, some 40,000 years ago. Language is of such little bit pregnant’ with language. ‘Representational
importance in our daily lives and culture that it is almost computation’ is perhaps an awkward way of saying
impossible to imagine how our species could survive ‘thinking with language’. Representational computation
without it. conveys the idea that thinking supported by linguistic
But perhaps the most surprising thing about the evolution expressions involves a second order level of
of language and the manipulation, not just of objects, events or states of
brain structures required to support it is – as indicated affairs, as perceived or imagined in ‘the mind’s eye’, but
earlier – how rapidly they were acquired by our species. It also the manipulation of symbolic representations of those
is well known that quite dramatic phenotypical changes objects, events or states of affairs. Thus, perception and
can take place under adaptation pressures in relatively episodic memory provide a first-order ‘internal’
short periods of evolutionary time. However, there representation of the ‘external’ world. But language users
appears to be no parallel in other species to the rapid have access to a second-order and publicly shareable level
increase in cranial capacity accompanied by the signs of of symbolic representation, whereby objects of perception
an evolving material culture that one finds in the human are coded as linguistic expressions.
archaeological record. What drove this massive yet In addition to linking the evolution of language to
selective increase in brain tissue, confined mainly to the symbolic reasoning – an idea which has a respectable
cerebral cortex and to some regions more than others? philosophical pedigree in European philosophy though
According to the co-evolution hypothesis, it was the not widespread acceptance in contemporary cognitive
voracious computational requirements of a symbolic science – the co-evolution hypothesis asserts that a
representational system, i.e. of a language. It is not quantal increase in the brain’s processing capacity was
difficult to appreciate this point. Just look up from the required to accommodate this second-order
book and cast an eye around the myriad of recognizably representational system. Also, that although the
distinct objects in your immediate field of view. A large evolutionary adaptation of the brain took place in
proportion of them have names. All the others can incremental steps, the pace of change was such as to
effectively be provided with names by verbal produce a qualitative new step in speciation. Furthermore,
constructions such as: ‘low radiation energy sticker’ for the co-evolution hypothesis asserts, controversially, that
the object fixed to the screen monitor casing of PC. thinking with- language is a unique facility of human
Language, as every language user knows, involves a kind brains. Deacon’s (1997a) book-length exposition of the
of doubling of our perceptual universe. For every object co-evolution hypothesis is a bold and controversial idea.
of experience, there is at least a name or a naming It has met with a very mixed reception from linguists,

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International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-1, Issue-1 , Nov-Dec- 2016
ISSN: 2456-7250
depending on their theoretical orientation. As a scientific paradigm seek to do. The P&P theory of language is in
hypothesis, it is rather too difficult to prove or to refute. fundamental respects antithetical to the idea, advanced in
We offer it here primarily to set you thinking along the the previous section, that language is an undifferentiated
paths we wish to explore in this book. Norman ‘symbolic system’. Nevertheless, P&P theory also
Geschwind in the 1960s was the first to offer a clear provides an alternative formulation of the co-evolution
account of how recently evolved cortical structures that hypothesis that the emergence of natural language drove
distinguish humans from primates enabled the formation the most recent ‘runaway’ stage of evolution of the
of extensive networks of cross-modal associations, which human brain, albeit a formulation with a very different
in his view provided the neural computational basis for conceptual foundation as a modular ‘faculty of language’.
vocabulary formation, and hence the evolution of a
natural system of symbolic representation. 1-4 The resilience of language:
Another reason for believing that the joint study of brain– It is undeniable that some regions of the brain are more
language relationships will be productive derives from the involved in linguistic, and specifically grammatical,
study of language itself and how it is acquired. Language, processing than others. However, the strongest version of
as we shall presently discover (if you have not done so the anatomical specialization hypothesis – that grammar
already), is the most complex of human artefacts,2 re- resides in the pattern of connections in Broca’s area – is
invented by each successive generation of language clearly false. As we have seen, there is considerable
learners, who are quite unaware of the enormity of their evidence that individuals who have suffered lesions to
accomplishment. Linguists like Noam Chomsky have Broca’s area do not lose their grammatical knowledge,
long argued that young children can only accomplish the but are simply unable to access it at will. Furthermore, the
remarkable feat of learning their native language by virtue most entrenched grammatical patterns, such as basic word
of inheriting some specialized neural machinery order or case inflections in morphologically rich
specifically designed for that task. The reference here is to languages, generally do remain accessible. This suggests
Chomsky’s principles and parameters (P&P) model of that linguistic knowledge is represented in a redundant
grammar. The principles are structural properties to which manner in various regions of the brain, with the language
all languages supposedly conform, constituting a areas acting as a kind of central switchboard. There is also
universal grammar (UG). The parameters define the ways evidence of close links between grammatical and lexical
languages can vary from one another. The idea is that if a deficits, which in turn suggests that these two aspects of a
large part of the structural complexity of human language speaker’s linguistic competence are closely intertwined.
is pre-programmed into structural principles, then Another important lesson to be learned from the research
language learners have only to discover the parameter on aphasia is that our capacity to use language is
settings appropriate for their language community. Thus, extremely resilient. In immature individuals, language can
the ‘principles’ set limits on how human languages may survive the loss of the ‘language areas’ or even of the
vary, confining natural languages to a restrictive set of entire left hemisphere. In adults, such large-scale
possible types, thereby narrowing the ‘search space’ of reorganization is not possible, perhaps because the
the language learner. Furthermore, if a special ‘parameter regions which take over language processing in brain-
setting’ mechanism for language learning can be invoked, damaged children are already committed to other
then it is easier to see how first language acquisition functions. However, there is evidence that even adults are
could be under the control of ‘instinctive’ maturational able to recruit new areas or make new connections to
mechanisms, by analogy to such behaviours as nest some extent. Furthermore, adults are certainly able to
building in birds or ‘learning to walk’ in mammals. In this compensate for the damage suffered by developing new
way, a language faculty can be conceived as a special- language processing strategies. Both of these facts lend
purpose module of the mind/brain, dedicated to the further support to the claim that the architecture
demands of spoken language communication and supporting the human language faculty is very flexible.
acquired through special learning mechanisms linked to
the maturation of perceptual, motor and cognitive systems 1-5 Aphasia as evidence of the brain’s representation
of the infant brain. of language:
Clearly a great deal of investigative groundwork is The study of aphasia, or the loss of language functions
needed to isolate the principles and parameters that caused by damage to the ‘language areas’ of the brain, has
underlie natural languages and to then show how such been our major historical source of evidence for the study
principles and parameters may be incorporated into a of brain–language relationships. We can trace the clinical
model of first language acquisition.3 But this is precisely study of brain–language relationships to Paul Broca’s
what linguists and psycholinguists in the Chomskian (1861) famous discovery of the language area that bears

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International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-1, Issue-1 , Nov-Dec- 2016
ISSN: 2456-7250
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