Greg Detre
29/11/00
theme organisation (Hoff???) � played sentence with the central theme delayed (unnatural)
RH vs LH damage (anterior vs posterior)
organisation of the theme only matters if you�re brain damaged
RH anterior lesions � made more stuff up, embellished
RH good for taking a step back from the specifics???
because the patients are having trouble extracting the gist, they can't elaborate on that theme, so they embellish the details
LH � analytical, extraction of linguistic meaning, rule-based
RH � additional processing, more diffuse meanings, wider perspectives
language is still very LH-dominant
Methodologies
neuroimaging � see moment-by-moment
no damage � between symptoms and autopsy
but low spatial resolution
ERP � very good temporal resolution
fMRI � magnetic polarisation, blood flow, poor temporal resolution
magnet polarises the hydrogen molecules
rapid acoustic sounds � LH dominant
linguistic specific???
language-impaired children are poor at distinguishing the tones, critical in making sense of spoken language by dividing sounds into fine-grained chunks
sign language studies
do they have LH dominance? yes, so LH must be language-specific
rather than just hearing/speaking - paraphasia
many spoken/sign language parallels
LH dominance = language not physiological mechanisms
spoken is more temporal???
but both use temporal sequences/patterns
studies on language-impaired children with sign-language
aphasiology, dyslexias, not really developmental language impairments