language areas

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Speaking a Second Language May Delay Different Dementias

MINNEAPOLIS – In the largest study on the topic to date, research shows that speaking a second language may delay the onset of three types of dementias. The research is published in the November 6, 2013, online issue ofNeurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that people who spoke two languages developed dementia four and a half years later than people who only spoke one language. “Our study is the first to report an advantage of speaking two languages in people who are unable to read, suggesting that a person’s level of education is not a sufficient explanation for this difference,” said study author Suvarna Alladi, DM, with Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, India. “Speaking more than one language is thought to lead to better development of the areas of the brain that handle executive functions and attention tasks, which may help protect from the onset of dementia.” For the study, 648 people from India with an average age of 66 who were diagnosed with dementia were evaluated. Of those, 391 spoke two or more languages. A total of 240 had Alzheimer’s disease, 189 had vascular dementia and 116 had frontotemporal dementia, with the remainder having dementia with Lewy bodies and mixed dementia. Fourteen percent were illiterate. People who spoke two languages had a later onset of Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia and vascular dementia than people who spoke only one language. The difference was also found in those who could not read. There was no additional benefit in speaking more than two languages. The two-language effect on age of dementia onset was shown separately of other factors such as education, gender, occupation and whether participants lived in the city or country. “These results offer strong evidence for the protective effect of bilingualism against dementia in a population very different from those studied so far in terms of its ethnicity, culture and patterns of language use,” Alladi said. The study was supported by the Indian Department of Science and Technology. To learn more about dementia, please visit www.aan.com/patients.

The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 26,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit http://www.aan.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.

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Contact: Skip Derra
skip.derra@asu.edu
480-965-4823
Arizona State University 

Researchers show the power of mirror neuron system in learning and language understanding

TEMPE, Ariz. – Anyone who has tried to learn a second language knows how difficult it is to absorb new words and use them to accurately express ideas in a completely new cultural format. Now, research into some of the fundamental ways the brain accepts information and tags it could lead to new, more effective ways for people to learn a second language.

Tests have shown that the human brain uses the same neuron system to see an action and to understand an action described in language. Researchers at Arizona State University have been testing the boundaries of this hypothesis, which focuses on the operation of the mirror neuron system (MNS). The ASU group has found that the MNS can be modified by language use, and that the modification can slightly change visual perception.

The work focuses on how the brain receives and classifies information that a person sees (an action, like one person giving another a pencil) and tests how the brain receives the information from a description of an action (simulation), like "Cameron gives Annagrace a pencil."

"We tested the idea that the mirror neuron system, which is part of the motor system, is used in the simulation process," said Arthur Glenberg, an Arizona State University professor of psychology. "The MNS is active both when a person takes an action (e.g., giving a pencil) and when that action is observed, (witnessing the pencil being given)." Supposedly, the MNS allows us to infer the intentions of other people, so that when Jane sees Cameron act, her MNS resonates, and then Jane understands why she would give Annagrace the pencil and infers that that is the reason why Cameron gives Annagrace the pencil."

Glenberg, Noah Zarr, formerly an ASU psychology major and now a graduate student at Indiana University, and Ryan Ferguson, a graduate student in ASU's Cognitive Science training area in the Department of Psychology, recently published their findings in the paper "Language comprehension warps the mirror neuron system," in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. This research began with Zarr's honors thesis.

"The MNS has been associated with many social behaviors, such as action, understanding and empathy, as well as language understanding," Glenberg explained. "Previous work has demonstrated that adapting the MNS can affect language comprehension. But no one had yet shown that the process of language comprehension can itself change the MNS."

"The question becomes when Jane reads, 'Cameron gives Annagrace the pencil' is she using her MNS just like when she sees Cameron give the pencil," Glenberg asks. "To test this idea, we used the fact that the MNS is used in both action and perception of action, and the idea that repeated use of a neural system leads to adaptation of that system."

"So, in the tests participants read a bunch of transfer sentences," Glenberg explained. "We then show them a bunch of videos of transfer. We have shown that after reading the sentences, people are impaired (a little bit) in perceiving the transfer in the videos, which means the reading modifies the same MNS used in action understanding.

While the work explores the boundaries of a theory on comprehension there are applications in which it could be employed, Glenberg said.

"If language comprehension is a simulation process that uses neural systems of action, then perhaps we can better teach kids how to understand what they read by getting them to literally simulate the actions," he explained.

Glenberg added that part of his on going research into the mirror neuron system, the system that allows us to decipher what we see and understand the intent of language, is to test the idea of simulation and how it can help Latino English language learners read better in English.

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Source: Arthur Glenberg, (480) 727-7790

Media contact: Skip Derra, (480) 965-4823; skip.derra@asu.edu

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Researchers map brain areas vital to understanding language:: discourse conprehension

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Researchers map brain areas vital to understanding language

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L. Brian Stauffer

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Neuroscience professor Aron Barbey and his colleagues used brain injury data from Vietnam War veterans to map the ability of humans to understand written or spoken language, also known as “discourse comprehension.”
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11/21/2013 | Chelsey B. Coombs, News Bureau Intern | 217-333-5802; diya@illinois.edu

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When reading text or listening to someone speak, we construct rich mental models that allow us to draw conclusions about other people, objects, actions, events, mental states and contexts. This ability to understand written or spoken language, called “discourse comprehension,” is a hallmark of the human mind and central to everyday social life. In a new study, researchers uncovered the brain mechanisms that underlie discourse comprehension.

Researchers compared the discourse comprehension abilities of patients with damage to specific brain regions relative to patients without damage to those regions. Each image here represents one slice of the brain and the highlighted areas are those that are important for discourse comprehension. | Photo by Aron Barbey

The study appears in Brain: A Journal of Neurology.

With his team, study leader Aron Barbey, a professor ofneuroscience, of psychology, and of speech and hearing scienceat the University of Illinois, previously had mapped general intelligence, emotional intelligence and a host of other high-level cognitive functions. Barbey is the director of the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.

To investigate the brain regions that underlie discourse comprehension, the researchers studied a group of 145 American male Vietnam War veterans who sustained penetrating head injuries during combat. Barbey said these shrapnel-induced injuries typically produced focal brain damage, unlike injuries caused by stroke or other neurological disorders that affect multiple regions. These focal injuries allowed the researchers to pinpoint the structures that are critically important to discourse comprehension.

“Neuropsychological patients with focal brain lesions provide a valuable opportunity to study how different brain structures contribute to discourse comprehension,” Barbey said.

A technique called voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping allowed the team to pool data from the veterans’ CT scans to create a collective, three-dimensional map of the cerebral cortex. They divided this composite brain into units called voxels (the three-dimensional counterparts of two-dimensional pixels). This allowed them to compare the discourse comprehension abilities of patients with damage to a particular voxel or cluster of voxels with those of patients without injuries to those brain regions.

The researchers identified a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal cortex that are essential to discourse comprehension.

“Rather than engaging brain regions that are classically involved in language processing, our results indicate that discourse comprehension depends on an executive control network that helps integrate incoming language with prior knowledge and experience,” Barbey said. Executive control, also known as executive function, refers to the ability to plan, organize and regulate one’s behavior.

“The findings help us understand the neural foundations of discourse comprehension, and suggest that core elements of discourse processing emerge from a network of brain regions that support language processing and executive functions. The findings offer new insights into basic questions about the nature of discourse comprehension," Barbey said, "and could offer new targets for clinical interventions to  help patients with cognitive-communication disorders.

“Discourse comprehension is a hallmark of human social behavior,” Barbey said. “By studying the mechanisms that underlie these abilities, we’re able to advance our understanding of the remarkable cognitive and neural architecture from which language comprehension emerges.”

Editor's note: To reach Aron Barbey, call 217-244-2551; email barbey@illinois.edu.

The paper, “Neural mechanisms of discourse comprehension: a human lesion study,” is availableonline or from the U. of I. News Bureau.

Where is language located in the brain? There are two sides to this story

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Where is language located in the brain? There are two sides to this story

Simple facts about the brain are rare, but one of them is that for most people language function is located mainly in their left brain hemisphere. The stats vary according to the measures used, but this is the situation for around 95 per cent of right-handers and approximately 75 per cent of left-handers. When it comes to the brain though, few things are straight-forward.

If we dig deeper, as Byron Bernal and Alfredo Ardila have done for a new review paper, we find a more complex, two-sided story. The extent to which language is dominated by the left hemisphere is not fixed. It increases through childhood and adolescence, and then this trend reverses in old age, with signs of greater sharing of language function across the brain hemispheres in later life. Moreover, by characterising people in binary fashion as having their language abilities housed either in their left or right hemisphere, we ignore those people for whom language is a genuinely "bilateral function," meaning that both brain hemispheres are substantially involved.

As Bernal and Ardila point out, a dramatic demonstration of this comes from the Wada test, named after  Japanese neurologist Juhn Atsushi Wada. With the patient awake, anaesthetic is injected into the neck or head on one side to effectively shut down function in that side of the brain. Speech and language comprehension tests are conducted first with one hemisphere silenced, then the other. Looking at the results from 1,799 Wada tests, most of which were conducted with epilepsy patients prior to surgery, Bernal and Ardila found that 10 per cent of right-handers and 27 per cent of left-handers (and the ambidextrous) showed evidence that their language function was supported by both brain hemispheres.

The way that bilateral language function manifests in the Wada test varies from patient to patient. In some, shutting down one hemisphere has no effect on their language abilities, while shutting down the other only partially interferes with language. In other patients, shutting down one hemisphere completely impairs language, while shutting down the other also has a partial adverse effect. And in a final group, shutting down either hemisphere results in only a partial impairment to language.

The reason for these different patterns, Bernal and Ardila explain, is that there are various ways that language function can be shared between the hemispheres. Using brain scans from real life case studies, they show how in some people all functions of language are shared between the left and right brain, whereas for other people some sub-functions of language are bilateral, but not others. For instance, the faculties involved in language comprehension might be bilateral, but the faculties of language production are not, or vice versa (similar dissociations can be found for processing sound and meaning). Related to this, some people show evidence that the different steps of language function are distributed sequentially between the hemispheres (e.g. one stage processed on one side, the next stage on the other), so there is no redundancy, whereas other people show a kind of parallel arrangement where both hemispheres are able to perform the same steps of language processing.

We need to be cautious when extrapolating from patient studies to healthy people because it's possible that the brain has altered its function to adapt to disease. This caveat aside, Bernal and Ardila's fascinating review is a reminder of the brain's complexity. The factoid that in most people language is left-lateralized conceals a messy reality. "It is a frequent understanding that language lateralization is a matter of all or nothing," write Bernal and Ardila. "However, language dominance is mostly a matter of hemispheric advantage for a specific multi-modular cognitive function: language. As such, language in a strict sense is up to a certain point a bilateral brain function."

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Byron Bernal and Alfredo Ardila (2013). Bilateral representation of language: A critical review and analysis of some unusual cases. Journal of Neurolinguistics DOI:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2013.10.002

--Further reading--
The boy who learned to speak again after losing his left brain hemisphere.
Glimpsed at last - the life of neuropsychology's most important patient.
500 Francs Says Language Is Housed in the Frontal Lobes!

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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13-Nov-2013

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Contact: Andrea Ravignani
andrea.ravignani@univie.ac.at
43-142-777-6101
University of Vienna 

Monkeys 'understand' rules underlying language musicality

This news release is available in German.

		IMAGE: This is Andrea Ravignani, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. Click here for more information.

Many of us have mixed feelings when remembering painful lessons in German or Latin grammar in school. Languages feature a large number of complex rules and patterns: using them correctly makes the difference between something which "sounds good", and something which does not. However, cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna have shown that sensitivity to very simple structural and melodic patterns does not require much learning, or even being human: South American squirrel monkeys can do it, too.

Language and music are structured systems, featuring particular relationships between syllables, words and musical notes. For instance, implicit knowledge of the musical and grammatical patterns of our language makes us notice right away whether a speaker is native or not. Similarly, the perceived musicality of some languages results from dependency relations between vowels within a word. In Turkish, for example, the last syllable in words like "kaplanlar" or "güller" must "harmonize" with the previous vowels. (Try it yourself: "güllar" requires more movement and does not sound as good as "güller".)

Similar "dependencies" between words, syllables or musical notes can be found in languages and musical cultures around the world. The biological question is whether the ability to process dependencies evolved in human cognition along with human language, or is rather a more general skill, also present in other animal species who lack language.

		IMAGE: This is a Squirrel monkey/Saimiri sciureus. Click here for more information.

Andrea Ravignani, a PhD candidate at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, and his colleagues looked for this "dependency detection" ability in squirrel monkeys, small arboreal primates living in Central and South America. Inspired by the monkeys' natural calls and hearing predispositions, the researchers designed a sort of "musical system" for monkeys. These "musical patterns" had overall acoustic features similar to monkeys' calls, while their structural features mimicked syntactic or phonological patterns like those found in Turkish and many human languages.

Monkeys were first presented with "phrases" containing structural dependencies, and later tested using stimuli either with or without dependencies. Their reactions were measured using the "violation of expectations" paradigm. "Show up at work in your pyjamas, people will turn around and stare at you, while at a slumber party nobody will notice", explains Ravignani: In other words, one looks longer at something that breaks the "standard" pattern. "This is not about absolute perception, rather how something is categorized and contrasted within a broader system." Using this paradigm, the scientists found that monkeys reacted more to the "ungrammatical" patterns, demonstrating perception of dependencies. "This kind of experiment is usually done by presenting monkeys with human speech: Designing species-specific, music-like stimuli may have helped the squirrel monkeys' perception", argues primatologist and co-author Ruth Sonnweber.

"Our ancestors may have already acquired this simple dependency-detection ability some 30 million years ago, and modern humans would thus share it with many other living primates. Mastering basic phonological patterns and syntactic rules is not an issue for squirrel monkeys: the bar for human uniqueness has to be raised", says Ravignani: "This is only a tiny step: we will keep working hard to unveil the evolutionary origins and potential connections between language and music".

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The research was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, SOMACCA, to Prof. Tecumseh Fitch, which is exploring the broad biological basis for music, language, and visual art.

Publication in "Biology Letters":

Ravignani A, Sonnweber R-S, Stobbe N, Fitch WT. 2013 Action at a distance: dependency sensitivity in a New World primate. Biol Lett 20130852.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0852

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