I found both readings very interesting and informative, and they gave me several new ways to view language learning. "How the Brain Handles Language" provided a great deal of information I was unaware of -- I was able to make a few basic connections to my psychology class, but did not realize how much localization and processing could be outlined and studied. I believe it is important to work to understand as much as possible about the brain's functions and the way different areas work together to play roles in the way we recognize, analyze, and respond to information. The text says that the left hemisphere tends to be "dominant for language in right-handed people", but different parts of each lobe are involved in different elements of speaking, writing, comprehension, and encoding, and "a multifunctional view is generally held today". I did appreciate phrases like "tentative generalizations" and "avoiding an oversimplified contrast", and I think that even beyond some inability to completely identify the different tasks parts of the brain perform (such as studying left-handed people and hemisphere dominance), some elements of language or understanding come from experience as well and not simply from biology. Tongue slips might be strongly related to rhythm units and the patterns the languages we speak follow, but I have also made tongue slips if I have had one idea in my head and was trying to express another. I would also be curious to see if language processing looks different depending on factors like familiarity with the language -- if I were learning a new language and trying to recognize patterns, might the right hemisphere be more active, for example?
I was particularly interested in the idea of processing meaning through the "'sense of sense'" -- often, it helps me to expose myself to new media and unfamiliar words but surround them with more familiar context (for example, reading a story and determining the meaning of new vocabulary) in order to build familiarity and more strongly engage with language. Today, I did use the process for explaining the sense of words through asking questions. One example was the verb "yào", meaning "to want to do something" or "to be going to do something." I asked to clarify if it could also be used to signify wanting an object, but learned that it had to be combined with another word used to signify thinking ("thinking to want something"). I then used example sentences to become more familiar with the use of the word. This process, combined with the readings, also emphasized that it will be important to push myself to converse quickly and learn through experience how collocations and senses come together to become more familiar with my target language. I am excited to combine my class and academic learning on how language is constructed -- I believe it will help me build proficiency and understanding much more quickly and inform my planning.
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