Madeleine Albright has just come out with a book titled Read My Pins. How is ‘reading’ Albright’s pins different from actual reading? How is interpretation of the pins different from language?
National Public Radio interview with Allbright:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113278807
Here is a short clip of the Australian bowerbird building a nest to impress a mate.
Here is a ppt on language acquisition:
Here is a ppt on poverty of stimulus:
http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/~zjakab/BSCS_Topics_in_Cognitive_Development/Lang_acq08.ppt
And one more on language acquisition:
plaza.ufl.edu/lcsonka/notes/Presentation17a.ppt
And another on language acquisition:
I’m just going to drift through the net here and pull some stuff up. It is very interesting to me that there are so many powerpoint presentations out there. We will have an assignment where I will ask you to find and present a powerpoint.
Auditory Cortex: The auditory cortex is ”The major cortical target of the neurons in the medial geniculate nucleus” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=.0POPlIEWmNCeTzBzCh5qiMtsI2nqLUmGxcvrfaQ7QG#2782). This image Dr. Ugurbil’s image of the auditory cortex shows the auditory cortex ‘light up’ when a word is heard. Compare the same brain area during reading.
Angular Gyrus: The angular gyrus ”plays a special role in inter-analyzer synthesis.” This UCSD news release Grasping Metaphor shows a nice picture of the angular gyrus ‘lighting up.’ A team led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, has found brain damage evidence for the role of the angular gyrus in interpreting metaphor. One subject, “prodded on “all that glitters is not gold,” … finally said that it meant you had to be very careful when buying jewelry because you might get robbed.”
The USCD team used the booba/kiki test.
Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area: A two-fer from Neuroscience for Kids. Scroll down to Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area and read that Broca’s area is for speech production and articulation and the Wernicke’s area is for (rather broadly) language comprehension. Broca’s area is associated with motor control of speech. Here’s Broca and a brain he studied, courtesy of Medical Science 532 of the U of Idaho. The site notes that Broca’s aphasia is also called expressive aphasia because people with damage to Broca’s area have difficulty producing spoken language. The National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders provides information about the types of aphasia. If Wernicke’s area is damaged, people “may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create made-up words. For example, someone with Wernicke’s aphasia may say, ‘You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before’” (quoted from the NIDCD site).
And then I ended up looking at homunculi:
motor homunculus From McGill’s The Brain.
Here is a sound file for our brief introduction to the Cherokee language. Here is a rough gloss in English. Listen to the sound file and write out the Cherokee words. What are the sounds of Cherokee?
apple, deer, pig, chicken, egg, eggs, someone’s mother, my mother, your mother, water, meat, fruit, something to eat, you are eating, you eat, something to drink, someone is drinking, dirt, soil
China’s many different ethnic groups speak many different languages, collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén (中国语文), literally “speech and writing of China” which mainly span six linguistic families.
Includes the many different Han Chinese language variants (commonly simply called Chinese) as well as non-Han minority languages such as Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.
Chinese is written with characters which are known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi).
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/language.htm
Has links to lessons as well as showing the writing systems.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/burmese.htm
Gives the origin of the writing system.
Mocking Artificial International Languages
Europanto
http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-eur2.htm
How English becomes German
http://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-german/
