I have to admit that I am surprised that language handling of the brain could be so intricate and bizarre. For example, the author states that for right-handed people, the left hemisphere is dominant for language learning. On the other side, for left-handed people, language learning is dominant by not only the left but also the right hemisphere, called mixed dominance. What's more, different functions are only partly understood and are controlled by different hemispheres of the brain. For example, with right-handed people, the left controls activities like analytical thinking, logical organization, and calculation while the right hemisphere handles musical patterns and creative sensibility. However, I am very curious about how hemispheres function differently regarding the left-handed people.
Also, simple daily conversations require a series of complicated neurological processes, planning, and execution. And every time people want to articulate a word or a phrase, the brain has to plan ahead the behavior and then issue commands and the body executes. What's more surprising is that I could never know "slips of the tongue " could be one of the indicators of how the brain works and processes during conversations. Tongue slips are involuntary and incorrect departures from the person's intentional production of words and tongue slips are not randomly happened but are found when two words are from the same grammatical construction or rhythm. It is because of these unintended errors people make that provide more details of how the brain process and command information.
The other articles, unlike the previous-mentioned one, is more about how languages make sense, how to distinguish different languages and what can be the difficulty of mastering a new language. One thing I find interesting is that isolated words don't mean to be complete nonsense but they are just conveying too much information. Therefore, it is the sentence and the word to sentence structure interaction that makes the "sense of sense", which circumscribed the words and make them convey the intended meanings. Collocations are one of the difficulties for people to master a new language since they are complicated, some of which may be personal or don't make sense because of the relation between different lexemes. In addition, collocations differ greatly in different languages. For example, in Japanese, the verb "drink" collocates with not only water and soup but tablets and smoking.
In a nutshell, mastering a new language is not only about memorizing alphabets or grammar but in order to comprehend the meaning, one needs to experience by soaking into the environment. All that matter is speaking.
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