Neurolinguistics

What biological factors make human communication poss- ible? How do we process and understand language? How does brain damage affect these mechanisms, and what can this tell us about how language is organized in the brain? The field of neurolinguistics seeks to answer these questions, which are crucial to linguistics, psychology and speech pathology alike. Drawing on examples from everyday language, this textbook introduces the central topics in neurolinguistics: speech recognition, word and sentence structure, meaning, and discourse – in both ‘normal’ speakers and those with language disorders. It moves on to provide a balanced discussion of key areas of debate such as modularity and the ‘language areas’ of the brain, ‘connectionist’ versus ‘symbolic’ modelling of language processing, and the nature of linguistic and mental representations. Making accessible over half a century of scientific and linguistic research, and containing extensive study questions, it will be welcomed by all those interested in the relationship between language and the brain.

JOHN C. L. INGRAM is Senior Lecturer on the Linguistics Program at the University of Queensland. He has published widely on speech and language disorders, sound change in second language acquisition, phonetic variation in Australian English, connected speech processes, acoustic phonetics, foreign accent phenomena and forensic speaker identification.

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CAMBRIDGE TEXTBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS

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Neurolinguistics
An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing and its Disorders

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J. C. L. INGRAM Neurolinguistics: An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing and its Disorders

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Neurolinguistics

An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing
and its Disorders

JOHN C. L. INGRAM
University of Queensland, Australia

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© John C. L. Ingram 2007

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For Carolyn

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Contents

		List of figures	page xv
		List of tables	xvii
		Preface and acknowledgements	xix
		Note on the text	xxi
part I		Foundational concepts and issues
1		Introduction and overview	3
		Introduction	3
		Co-evolution of language and the brain	5
		An alternative view of co-evolution	7
		Language areas in the brain	10
		Aphasia as evidence of the brain’s representation of language	11
		The language faculty (localization and modularity)	12
2		Aspects of linguistic competence	15
		Introduction	15
		Forms and meanings	17
		Minimal design features of a language	21
		Phonology and syntax as aspects of form	23
		Phonology: the sound patterns of spoken language	24
		Prosody: the phonology of supra-segmental features	26
		Semantics: the representation of meaning	30
		Assertion/presupposition and clause structure	31
		Specificity, reference and deixis	32
		Thematic roles and case	34
		Time reference: tense, aspect and modality	35
		Concluding remarks	36
3		The neuroanatomy of language	40
		Introduction	40
		An orientation to the structures of the cerebral cortex	42
		Discovery of the language areas	48
		The classical account: the Broca-Wernicke-Lichtheim (BWL) model	50
		Non-localizationist views	55
		Site of lesion studies	56
		The neuropsychological perspective	57
		Neural imaging	59
		Metabolic functional imaging	60
		Encephalographic functional imaging	60
		Magnetoencephalography	62
		Combined imaging methods	63
		The subtraction method	63
		Summary: functional neural imaging	64
		Postscript: linguistic structures and the neuroanatomy of language	64
4		On modularity and method	66
		Introduction	66
		Chomskian modularity	68
		Fodorian modularity	69
		Summary: Fodor’s concept of modularity	72
		Modularity uncoupled: Max’s chocolate factory	73
		Modularity and real-time processing	76
		Real-time processing	77
		The connectionist challenge	79
		Connectionist architectures	80
		Connectionist models and neural networks	82
		Symbolic algorithms versus statistical processors	82
		Hybrid models	83
		Summarizing	84
		Modularity of linguistic competence	85
		Fodor’s modularity of processing	88
		Coltheart’s functional modularity	89
part II		Speech perception and auditory processing
5		The problem of speech recognition	93
		Introduction	93
		Three aspects of word recognition	93
		Speech signals, spectrograms and speech recognition	94
		A simple model of speech recognition: phoneme to sound matching	95
		An alternative model: word to sound pattern-matching	96
		Why speech recognition is difficult	96
		The segmentation problem	96
		The variability problem	97
		The rate of information transmission in speech perception	100
		Lexical retrieval in speech perception	101
		Phonological parsing prior to lexical access	102
		Phonetic forms and phonological representations	105
		Under-specified (abstract) versus fully specified (concrete) forms	108
		Discrete (categorical) versus graded (continuous) properties	108
		Hierarchical organization versus entrainment	109
		Summary	110
6		Speech perception: paradigms and findings	112
		Introduction	112
		The speech mode hypothesis	113
		Strong and weak versions of the speech mode hypothesis	114
		Dichotic listening	115
		Categorical perception	117
		Coarticulation effects and category boundary shifts	122
		Duplex perception	123
		Sine wave speech	125
		Conclusions: is speech perception special?	126
		Linguistic experience and phonological parsing	127
		Tuning the auditory system: perceptual magnet effects	128
		Prosodic bootstrapping	129
		Phonetic and phonological levels of processing in speech recognition	132
		Conclusions from the gating experiments	137
7		The speech recognition lexicon	140
		Introduction	140
		Search models of lexical retrieval	142
		The TRACE model	144
		Architecture of TRACE	144
		Lexical effects in TRACE	146
		Empirical tests of the TRACE model	147
		Modelling coarticulation effects and other sequential dependencies	149
		Modelling variability: a challenge for connectionist models?	152
		Auditory-phonetic and phonological levels of representation	154
8		Disorders of auditory processing	155
		Introduction	155
		Flow-on effects of temporal sequencing deficit	157
		Levels and types of auditory processing disorder	158
		Clinical classification of auditory processing disorders	159
		Disturbances of auditory-acoustic processing	160
		Cortical deafness	161
		Auditory agnosia	161
		Auditory-acoustic processing deficits and aphasia	163
		Effects of brain damage on phonetic feature extraction	164
		Pure word deafness	164
		Studies of prevalence of word-sound deafness	165
		The nature of word-sound deafness	165
		The neural basis for speech agnosia or pure word deafness	168
		Mirror neurons and the speech-motor loop	171
		Disturbances in accessing the recognition lexicon	173
		Summary	175
part III		Lexical semantics
9		Morphology and the mental lexicon	179
		Introduction	179
		Morphological decomposition in the mental lexicon	181
		Psycholinguistic studies of word structure	184
		Semantic and morphological relatedness	186
		Priming effects of prefixes and suffixes	187
		Conclusions from the Marslen-Wilson et al. study	188
		Cross-linguistic generalizations on morphological processing	189
		Neuroimaging studies of normal and aphasic morphological processes	190
		PET and MEG studies of morphological processing	190
		Summary	196
10		Lexical semantics	199
		Introduction	199
		Semantic networks	201
		Testing Quillian’s model	204
		Evaluation of TLC	205
		From word to sentence meanings	205
		Conceptual dependency theory	207
		Evaluation of symbolic models of lexical semantics	209
		Investigating semantic structures	210
		The role of context in word-sense disambiguation	211
		Semantic priming and the activation/retrieval of word meaning	211
		Results: associative and semantic priming and the effect of prime type	214
		Brain imaging studies of lexical semantic activation	215
		Summary	219
11		Lexical semantic disorders in aphasia	221
		Introduction	221
		Early work	223
		Competence or performance deficit in lexical semantic disorder?	225
		Behavioural on-line measures of lexical access and organization in aphasia	226
		On-line lexical processing in Wernicke’s aphasia	227
		On-line lexical processing in Broca’s aphasia	228
		Lexical integration in aphasia	230
		Category-specific semantic impairment	232
		A case study of domain-specific semantic impairment	235
		Explaining patterns of category-specific semantic impairment	237
		Summary	238
part IV		Sentence comprehension
12		Sentence comprehension and syntactic parsing	243
		Introduction	243
		Syntactic processing and sentence comprehension	244
		The grammar and the parser	245
		Competing models of sentence processing	249
		Asyntactic sentence comprehension: the case of agrammatism	250
		Thematic role assignment and sentence comprehension	250
		Reversible passive constructions	251
		Canonical word order and thematic relations in complex sentences	253
		Strategies for processing complex sentences	254
		Summary: grammatical heuristics and agrammatism	255
		Ambiguity resolution and syntactic parsing strategies	256
		Lexical and syntactic ambiguity	257
		Why ambiguity is important for theories of language processing	258
		Minimal attachment	259
		Testing minimal attachment	261
		Local ambiguities and garden path sentences	261
		Summary	264
13		On-line processing, working memory and modularity	266
		Introduction	266
		Working memory, parsing and syntactic complexity	266
		Individual differences in working memory capacity and sentence processing	269
		Modularity and VWMC	270
		Sequential or parallel processing as a capacity effect	273
		Syntactic complexity	275
		Gibson’s model of parsing complexity	276
		Properties of Gibson’s parser	278
		Summary and recapitulation	279
		Syntactic trace reactivation	280
		Load/capacity effects and the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm	284
		Recapitulation and summary: trace reactivation and the CMLP paradigm	285
		Neural imaging techniques and on-line sentence processing	286
		Phrase structure and argument structure violations and ERPs	288
		Jabberwocky sentence processing and ERPs	290
		Deep and surface anaphora	291
		General summary and conclusions	294
14		Agrammatism revisited	297
		Introduction	297
		Agrammatism revisited	299
		Off-line methods of language comprehension assessment	300
		A case for syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasia	301
		A case against syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasia	304
		Three theories of agrammatism	309
		Weighing the evidence	312
		Grammaticality judgement and sentence comprehension	312
		Trace reactivation and on-line measures of sentence processing	317
		Slow retrieval or under-activation of lexical items	319
		Self-paced listening and transient processing load	320
		ERP imaging of on-line sentence processing in aphasia	323
		Summary and conclusion	324
part V		Discourse: language comprehension in context
15		Discourse processing	331
		Introduction	331
		Discourse modelling	332
		Discourse construction: an example	333
		Reference management and pragmatic knowledge	335
		Relevance	336
		Strong and weak implicature and relevance	337
		Refining a model of discourse	338
		Under-specification	339
		Sentence-level discourse devices	339
		Studies of discourse anaphora resolution	341
		On-line studies of discourse anaphora	343
		Summary	345
16		Breakdown of discourse	346
		Introduction	346
		Language and psychosis	349
		Characteristics of thought disordered speech	350
		A study of thought disordered speech	351
		Cognitive impairment and thought disordered language	354
		Summarizing the evidence on executive dysfunction in thought disorder	359
		Neurological models of thought disorder	361
		The dopamine hypothesis	362
		The cingulate modulation hypothesis	363
		Conclusion	366
17		Conclusion and prospectus	367
		Introduction	367
		Connectionist models of language processing: a case study	367
		Embodied cognition as a perspective on language processing	374
		Concrete or abstract perceptual representations of speech sounds	377
		Lexical retrieval mechanisms	378
		Discourse structure and embodiment	378
		Glossary	380
		References	387
		Index	414

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Figures

		1.1  The cerebral cortex: the language areas and major anatomical landmarks	page 11
		1.2  Phrenology diagram: frontispiece to Spurzheim’s Outlines of phrenology, 1827	13
		2.1  Components of the linguistic model	37
		3.1  Lobes of cerebral cortex	43
		3.2  Somatosensory cortex	44
		3.3  Flat projections of human and macaque cerebral cortex	47
		3.4  The Wernicke-Lichtheim model	52
		3.5  Disturbances in phoneme perception	57
		3.6  The single word processing model	59
		4.1  Neural network for printed word recognition	81
		5.1  Spectrogram: sheep like soft grass	94
		5.2  Speaking style and alternative pronunciations of I’m going to leave	99
		5.3  Spectrogram: I should have thought spectrograms were unreadable	99
		5.4  Transcription accuracy of the nonce phrases	104
		5.5  Levels of prosodic structure	109
		6.1  Stop consonant + vowel syllables produced by the pattern playback synthesizer	116
		6.2  Discrimination and identification functions for /b-d-g/ for three listeners	119
		6.3  Morphing visual images to create a ‘Clinton-Kennedy’ continuum	121
		6.4  Duplex stimulus construction	124
		6.5  Prototype (P) and non-prototype (NP) [i] vowels and perceptual magnet effects	128
		6.6  The gating paradigm	133
		6.7  Gating experiment: Bengali listeners’ response to nasalized vowels	136
		7.1  How coarticulation effects are simulated in TRACE	146
		7.2  Simple recurrent network (SRN)	150
		8.1  Hickok and Poeppel’s dorsal and ventral stream model	170
		9.1  PET activation for regular, irregular and nonce past-tense forms	192
		9.2  MEG differences to regular and irregular verbs	196
		10.1  Three planes representing the meaning of Plant in Quillian’s TLC model	202
		10.2  Conceptual dependency diagram for John ate a frog	208
		10.3  Augmented conceptual dependency diagram for John ate a frog	209
		10.4  The areas activated in the verbs–nouns contrast	218
		11.1  Types and relative incidence of category-specific semantic disorders	233
		12.1  Partial parsing of A cat is on the couch	246
		12.2  Minimalist derivation of A cat is on the couch	247
		12.3  Surface structure syntax	257
		12.4  Contrasting ‘underlying’ structures for sentence	258
		13.1  Reading times for relative clauses: Ferreira and Clifton (1986)	272
		13.2  Interaction of verbal working memory capacity with syntactic and pragmatic cues	273
		13.3  Three NPs awaiting case assignment	277
		13.4  ERPs to well-formed, semantically anomalous and syntactically anomalous verbs	287
		13.5  Differences in ERPs under ellipsis and discourse model interpretive (MI) anaphora	293
		14.1  Dendrograms for The baby cries	302
		14.2  Dendrograms for sentences 2–3	303
		15.1  Hypothetical process of construal of mini-discourse 3	337
		16.1  Sample of syntactic and error coding	352
		16.2  The Tower of London Test	357
		16.3  Temporal lobe activation differences and relation to prefrontal activation in schizophrenia	364
		17.1  Hierarchical clustering of hidden-unit vectors	370
		17.2  Relative clause mini-grammar	371
		17.3  Elman: state space trajectories	373

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Tables

		2.1  Distributional properties of nouns and verbs (in English)	page 18
		2.2  Compositionality of form and meaning	21
		2.3  Basic levels and components of linguistic representation in human languages	23
		2.4  Semantic components and syntactic exponents	31
		2.5  Grammatical case, thematic role and grammatical function	35
		3.1  Typical phonological errors in Wernicke’s aphasic speech	50
		3.2  Complementary symptoms of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia	51
		3.3  Components of the ERP response	61
		4.1  Fodor’s criteria for modularity	71
		4.2  Production plant states of operation	75
		4.3  Competing approaches to language modelling	84
		5.1  Properties distinguishing phonetic and phonological representations	107
		6.1  Tendencies towards right-ear advantage in dichotic listening	116
		6.2  Results of three gating experiments: percentage of responses up to vowel offset	137
		8.1  Disorders of auditory processing and word recognition	160
		9.1  Form–frequency relations in English past tense	183
		9.2  Test conditions and morphological priming effects	185
		9.3  Morphological and semantic relatedness priming effects	187
		9.4  Morphological type and priming effect	187
		10.1  Some meanings of show and (scrambled) contexts of usage	200
		10.2  Searching semantic space for commonalities of word meaning	204
		10.3  TLC’s responses to word-pair meaning comparisons	205
		10.4  Prime–probe relations used by Moss et al. (1995)	213
		10.5  Triplet stimuli used in semantic judgement task (Tyler et al., 2004)	218
		11.1  Semantic feature specification	222
		11.2  Semantic feature assignment	223
		11.3  Semantic similarity scores	223
		11.4  Types of semantic relation between word pairs	224
		13.1  ERP effects of phrase structure and argument structure violations	289
		13.2  ERP effects of Jabberwocky sentences	291
		14.1  Sentence types used in Zurif et al.’s (1972) study	301
		14.2  Sentences from Linebarger et al. (1983)	305
		14.3  Theories of receptive agrammatism	311
		14.4  Trace violations and ease of detectability	314
		14.5  Sentence types used in Caplan and Waters (2003)	321
		15.1  Sentence-level discourse (focusing) devices	340
		15.2  Examples of discourse connectives	341
		16.1  Discriminant function analysis	353
		16.2  Categories of communication failure (Docherty et al., 1996)	355
		16.3  Tests of executive control and semantics (Barrera et al., 2005)	359

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Preface and acknowledgements

This book is intended as a self-contained introduction to the study of the language–brain relationship for students of cognitive science, linguistics and speech pathology. The essentially interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter posed considerable difficulties for the author and will likely do so also for the reader. So please be warned. Despite my considerable efforts to keep the pathways open between the villages of the cognate disciplines concerned, the jungle is everywhere and its capacity for re-growth is relentless.

As appropriate for an introductory text, the book is accessible to a wide readership. Foundational concepts and issues on the nature of language, language processing and brain language disorders (aphasiology) are presented in the first four chapters. This section of the book should be complementary with many stand-alone introductory courses in linguistics, psychology or neuroanatomy. Subsequent sections deal with successively ‘higher’ levels of language processing and their respective manifestations in brain damage: speech perception (chapters 5–8); word structure and meaning (lexical processing and its disorders; chapters 9–11); syntax and syntactic disorder (agrammatism; chapters 12–14); discourse and the language of thought disorder (chapters 15–16), followed by a brief final chapter, speculating on unsolved problems and possible ways forward. Each major section of the book begins by posing the principal questions at an intuitive level which is hopefully accessible to all. The often quite specialized research methods by which answers to these questions have been sought are then introduced, in a selective review of the literature.

The field of relevant studies was broad to begin with and has grown vastly since the pioneering studies in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and computational models of language processing were undertaken in the 1970s and surveyed with such flair and scholarship in Caplan’s Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology: An introduction (1987). It would be an impossible task to update Caplan’s seminal text in a single volume. Yet that was one of the quixotic goals that originally motivated the writing of this book. So, in each of the major topics that are taken up, the aim is to bring the reader to a view of the problems and issues that animate contemporary research. In this sense, the book is intended as an ‘introduction’ to the field and as such may serve as a resource for an advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate seminar.

It is difficult to date precisely the origins of this book and therefore to duly acknowledge the many people who have contributed towards it. But officially it began life as a collaboration with Helen Chenery, under the enthusiastic mentorship of Christine Bartels of Cambridge University Press. Helen’s ghost-like presence can be detected in the persistence of the authorial ‘we’, a writing habit that I evidently found hard to break and a device that I may be guilty of deploying at times, to persuade the reluctant reader to my point of view on matters of deep uncertainty. I am grateful to both of them for their support and wise editorial counsel, especially through the difficult early stages, where something is taking shape, but God knows what the outcome will be and the enormity of the task ahead is beginning to sink in.

Neil Smith read the entire manuscript – not once, but twice – and offered many invaluable and always tactfully put suggestions. I am greatly indebted also to Lucy Carolan, whose impeccable stylistic judgement greatly improved the readability of the text. Max Coltheart and Stephen Crain read selected chapters and offered cogent feedback. Thanks particularly to the students who read drafts of these chapters and in some cases showed in their term essays how the story could be better told. Teaching can be a humbling experience and nothing motivates hard thinking like the blank stares that can accompany the presentation of one’s latest pearls of wisdom. Most importantly, I would like to thank my wife, whose name appears in the dedication, for putting up with a distracted fool for several years of late nights and the squeaking chair in the wee hours.

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Note on the text

Words in bold type are explained in the Glossary (pp. 380–6 below).