Psycholinguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #11 - Free Educational videos for Students in K-12

Psycholinguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #11 - By CrashCourse

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00:0-1	Hi , I'm taylor and welcome to crash course linguistics
00:02	. Language happens thanks to the brain . This spongy
00:05	thing sitting in our skulls is responsible for our abilities
00:08	to acquire complex linguistic skills like phrenology , semantics ,
00:11	syntax and reading . It's what helps us great poems
00:14	and composed texts or get the meaning of a raised
00:17	eyebrow . Our string of random emojis understanding the brain
00:20	helps us understand how languages produced and interpreted . We
00:24	can point directly to the parts of our mouths and
00:26	hands that are used to make language but you can't
00:29	reach in and feel your own brain . Luckily over
00:31	the years , people have devised a whole range of
00:34	ways of looking at the brain to figure out where
00:36	and how language happens . This is the field of
00:40	psycho linguistics . Mm Interest in the relationship between language
00:54	and the brain really picked up in the 19th century
00:57	. Researchers observed people with language disorders and then looked
01:00	at their brains after they died . If damage to
01:02	one part of the brain from a stroke , dementia
01:05	or a head injury correlated with a difference in the
01:07	subject's ability to understand or produce language , the scientists
01:11	could predict that there was a relationship there . These
01:13	kinds of injuries that affect our language abilities are known
01:16	as F . Asia , to famous kinds of aphasia
01:18	discovered at the time are called Broca's aphasia , and
01:21	veronica's aphasia , the areas of the brain related to
01:24	each kind of aphasia therefore became known as Broca's area
01:28	and veronica's area . You may have heard about them
01:30	in a psychology or anatomy class , Broca's area is
01:33	located around your left temple and it was named after
01:36	Paul Broca , 1/19 century physician who noticed that people
01:40	who had been injured in this part of their brain
01:42	acted in similar ways well , they could still understand
01:45	language . They could only produce maybe a handful of
01:48	words one at a time , Broca's area affected their
01:51	ability to speak or sign in a fluid grammatical way
01:55	. In other words , it affected their ability to
01:57	use more fa syntax . Right around the time Broca
02:00	was making his discovery , german physician Carl veronica discovered
02:04	that if a different part of the brain was injured
02:06	, there was a totally different effects . People injured
02:09	in this spot located just above your left ear ,
02:12	tended to talk in a way that sounded fluent and
02:14	grammatical but was nonsensical verticals area is associated with the
02:19	meaning of language , but those 19th century studies were
02:22	limited and the brain is amazingly complex and flexible .
02:26	More recent research has found that some people can majorly
02:29	damaged Broca's area and never developed aphasia . Other people
02:33	can relearn how to speak through extensive practice , building
02:36	on their ability to sing , which is controlled by
02:39	a different part of the brain . These newer studies
02:41	help us understand neural plasticity , the ability of the
02:45	brain to flexibly build and connect parts of the brain
02:48	in response to injury or as part of learning .
02:50	And though the language areas are usually located on the
02:52	left hemisphere of the brain , some people's language areas
02:55	are found predominantly in the right hemisphere or spread across
02:58	both sides , especially for left handed or ambidextrous people
03:01	. So the relationship between language and the brain is
03:04	even more complicated than we first thought . Even now
03:06	, errors and differences and language use can teach us
03:09	about the different skills involved in language and how they're
03:12	organized inside our minds . We all sometimes forget a
03:15	word that we know perfectly well or accidentally swap words
03:18	, parts of words or idioms what you might encounter
03:21	a spoon , Tourism's tip of the tongue experiences or
03:23	mixed metaphors . These production errors tell us valuable things
03:27	about how the mind handles language like you know ,
03:29	when you just can't quite remember a word , you
03:32	know it , you almost have it , it's right
03:34	there , you just can't retrieve it . This phenomenon
03:38	is known as a tip of the tongue experience .
03:40	And psycho linguists have found that people with a word
03:43	on the tips of their tongues can often recall other
03:45	information about it . They might remember its meaning ,
03:48	its first letter and sometimes how many syllables it has
03:51	, but they can't quite recall the complete word signed
03:54	languages also have this phenomenon which is known as the
03:56	tip of the fingers naturally . And signers experiencing tip
04:00	of the fingers can also recall certain information about the
04:03	sign they're seeking , especially the initial hand shape and
04:06	location of the hand . They just can't recall a
04:08	movement . They need to complete the sign tip of
04:10	the tongue . And finger experiences can show us how
04:13	our thoughts are organized because we can have access to
04:15	the first letter or initial hand position without having access
04:19	to the remaining sounds or movement . Knowing a word
04:21	isn't a binary state of yes or no . Like
04:24	a computer . Our brains can also retain partial information
04:28	. Production errors are so useful that psycho linguists have
04:31	techniques for trying to get people to make even more
04:33	of them so that they can study those errors .
04:35	In a laboratory setting , psycho linguists can induce tip
04:38	of the tongue or finger experiences by asking people to
04:42	translate words or recall proper . Now , let's head
04:44	to the thought bubble to try another psycho linguistic experiment
04:47	. Right here in a moment to shapes are going
04:50	to appear on the screen . Let's decide which one
04:53	is called kiki and which one is called bouba .
04:56	Are you ready ? It's more than likely you called
05:00	the shape on the left cuba and the shape on
05:02	the right kiki . About nine out of every 10
05:04	people make that choice . Experiments have repeatedly shown that
05:07	we think of voiceless stops like and high vowels E
05:12	as small , sharp , crunchy , bright and spiky
05:16	compared to voice sounds like buddha and rounded vowels like
05:19	Ooh , which are big , lumpy , dark and
05:22	heavy across many different languages . The kiki buba experiment
05:26	shows us that language is related to other sensory experiences
05:29	. Yes . Words are still made up of arbitrary
05:32	smaller parts but it's not completely 100% arbitrary . And
05:36	this mapping between senses can show up in some general
05:39	tendencies for naming things across language . One large study
05:42	showed that words for knows were more likely to have
05:45	a nasal sound like mama orna . Across many different
05:48	languages , marketers are very aware of these links .
05:51	Buba wouldn't make a good name for a brand of
05:53	crackers , but kiki would because we generally want our
05:57	crackers to be crispy . But I'm sure Buba brand
05:59	ice cream would taste much better round and smooth and
06:02	creamy despite these general tendencies . There are also language
06:06	specific differences . If your language doesn't have a book
06:09	or you sound , you might not think of buba
06:12	as a possible word so you might not associated consistently
06:15	with the blobby shape . Different languages can also label
06:18	the shapes differently depending on how their sound systems work
06:21	. Town can influence how mandarin speakers label these shapes
06:23	. The human brain doesn't completely separate our linguistic knowledge
06:26	from other knowledge of the world . And experiments like
06:29	the kiki bouba . Test . Help show that .
06:31	Thanks . Thought bubble or should I say thought buba
06:34	. That's one kind of psycho linguistic experiment . But
06:36	it's far from the only one psycho linguists might use
06:39	a prime ng experiment to test how closely words are
06:42	related in the brain . They prime the participant with
06:45	one word and measure the speed of their responses to
06:47	other words . Say a subject is primed with the
06:50	word dog and then has a faster response to cat
06:52	than to other words . We might conclude cat and
06:55	dog are more closely related in the brain . We
06:57	can also use gating experiments where we measure how much
07:00	of a word a participant needs to hear or see
07:03	until they know I'm saying park instead of parked gating
07:06	experiments show that sounds aren't always produced in discrete sequences
07:10	, like our alphabet , makes them look like most
07:12	english speakers will produce the co sound in cuba a
07:15	little bit differently than the coast sound . In calm
07:18	psycho linguists have even looked into such mysteries as weather
07:21	, swearing helps us manage pain in that study psycho
07:24	linguists compared how long people could hold their hand in
07:27	a bucket of ice water when they were allowed to
07:29	swear and when they were not , when people were
07:32	allowed to swear , they could hold their hand in
07:34	the ice water for longer . Mm I'm definitely going
07:37	to find a practical application for this . Other ways
07:40	of figuring out what's going on in the brain when
07:41	we use language , involve using various kinds of equipment
07:44	. Eye tracking studies , try to figure out what
07:46	we're thinking about based on what we're looking at .
07:48	Let's say we're reading a sentence like this one .
07:51	Now the rabbit crouched on the cushion is a totally
07:54	reasonable english sentence . So that's where most people assume
07:57	it's going at first . But then when we get
07:59	to the words seemed we need to reevaluate . That's
08:02	where I tracking shows that a lot of people look
08:04	back at the earlier portion of the sentence to figure
08:06	out what's going on . In this case , a
08:08	structure more like the rabbit that was crouched on the
08:11	cushion , seemed friendly , misleading sentences like these are
08:15	called garden path sentences because they seem to lead you
08:18	up the garden path of one interpretation before you realize
08:21	there's actually a different structure going on . Eye tracking
08:24	and garden path sentences show us that we process sentences
08:27	as we're experiencing them . We don't wait until we've
08:30	seen or heard a whole sentence before starting to figure
08:32	out what's going on , electroencephalogram fee or E .
08:36	G . Records the electrical activity of neurons firing through
08:39	a cap of small sensors on the scalp . A
08:41	psycho linguists might hook a person out to an E
08:43	. G . And say a sentence like my favorite
08:46	ice cream is chocolate and socks , socks is semantically
08:49	unexpected in a sentence that we assumed would be about
08:52	food so the brain reacts accordingly . And an E
08:55	E . G . Is especially good at indicating when
08:57	a surgeon electricity happens . So here it might map
09:00	a kind of surge known as an N 400 around
09:03	400 milliseconds . After hearing socks , eggs are quiet
09:07	and relatively affordable , but they can be disturbed even
09:10	by small things like blinking . Plus they're not that
09:14	great at mapping where things happen in the brain ,
09:16	functional magnetic resonance imaging or FmRI , on the other
09:19	hand , is relatively precise in locating brain activity getting
09:23	within a few millimeters of where the activity is happening
09:26	. It does this by measuring when there's increased oxygen
09:29	in parts of the brain . The more neural activity
09:31	you're thinking , the more blood goes to the area
09:33	of the brain and that blood brings a lot of
09:36	oxygen to help those busy neurons . For example a
09:38	psycho linguists might have someone learn and recite back a
09:41	few words in a made up language to see what
09:44	happens in the brain . When we try to learn
09:45	a new language . While Fmri is relatively precise in
09:48	locating brain activity , it's less precise at when that
09:52	activity is happening , it only gets within a few
09:54	seconds while thoughts can happen in fractions of a second
09:58	. They're also very expensive and pretty dang uncomfortable to
10:01	hang out in . So there's sort of a trade
10:03	off . E . G machines are precise about time
10:05	but imprecise about space whereas MRI machines are precise about
10:09	space but imprecise about time . These machines with their
10:12	precise data and complex graphs might seem like just the
10:15	thing 19th century researchers like broken and veronica needed to
10:19	understand the link between the brain and language but really
10:22	we need to approach them with just as much caution
10:24	as those older experiments . There's still a lot of
10:27	individual variation and how our brains get organized as we
10:30	learn things and lots of psycho linguistics work has been
10:34	done with small numbers of people who speak dominant languages
10:37	like english . So we only know a little about
10:39	if and how being fluent in other languages affects what
10:43	happens in the brain . There's always more to learn
10:46	. See you next time when we talk about how
10:47	we learn language in the first place . Thanks for
10:49	watching this episode of crush chris linguistics . If you
10:52	want to help keep all crash course free for everybody
10:55	forever , you can join our community on Patreon .

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