I have attached the pdf for the exam. Mid-term exam pdf: Mid Term Take Home Short Essay Exam
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Mid Term Exam (due Monday Oct 19)
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009Language on the Brain
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009I’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.
Devanagari Script
Friday, September 11th, 2009African American Language (AAVE)
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009Ann Arbor “Black English trial” (1979)
(And Oakland School Board 1996)
Teachers use African American Language to teach standard English:
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/
http://www.cal.org/topics/dialects/aae.html
http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/christ01.html
http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/LingAnthro1.html
and KRS-1 Boogie Down Productions Why is that?
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Is-That-Explicit/dp/B002JLW0D8/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1251911946&sr=1-13
Course Evaluation
Friday, December 7th, 2007Please respond to the course evaluation. Your username is your 92#. Your password is your 6-digit birthdate (mmddyy). WCU Online Course Evaluation
Final Exam: Short Essays 12/11/07
Friday, December 7th, 2007The final exam will be on Tuesday from 8:30 to 11:oo. The final exam will be a short essay exam. You will choose five topics from a set of seven. Here is the final exam:Final Exam for ANTH493: Linguistic Anthropology
Final Study Guide for Tuesday 12/11/07 at 8:30am
Monday, December 3rd, 2007Here is a pdf of the final study guide. The final will be an essay exam. You will be asked five questions based on this study guide outline. The final is Tuesday, Dec. 11, from 8:30 to 11am.
Speech, Gender, Family – Mothers and Daughters
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007In You’re Wearing That? (Saturday Evening Post Sep/Oct2007, Vol. 279 Issue 5, p46-48, 3p) Deborah Tannen explores the conversations between mothers and daughters. Tannen claims “there is a special intensity to the mother-daughter relationship because talk–particularly talk about personal topics–plays a larger and more complex role in girls’ and women’s social lives than in boys’ and men’s.”
Tannen cites hair, clothing, and weight as the ‘Big Three’ topics of critique between mothers and daughters. Tannen demonstrates how a question can be used as a critique. The way of asking a question, the timing and the context, change its meaning. Tannen indulges in a bit of cognitive therapy: “Reframing is often key to dissipating anger. “ She argues that if we can impose a particular interpretation on the words of others, we can be happier for it.
Language and Politics
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007How do the politicians frame the issues? Where does the language of leadership come from? Speechwriters for President Bush fight to claim his mouth. Read about it in Mathew Scully’s Present at the Creation from The Atlantic, 9/07. Here is a link to full text from Hunter Library’s Academic Search Premier. Mathew Scully harshly criticizes his colleague Michael Gerson for taking credit for Bush’s public speeches. Scully offers a glimpse into the process of crafting political theater: “I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses — not even ‘axis of evil.’”
Language Variation in US: American Tongues
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007Today we watch American Tongues, a video produced by the Center for New American Media. Here is a JSTOR review of the video by Rolf Kjolseth