Before reading “How the Brain Handles Language,” I always thought that producing and comprehending a language was a simple process in our brains that gradually developed as we grew and became more fluent in the language. However, this reading taught me how complex the process of producing and comprehending speech was. I learned that Wernicke's area and Broca’s area are the most important parts of the brain for speech production and comprehension. In the production of speech, Wernicke's area generates the utterance structure, and the structure gets sent to the Broca’s area for encoding. For comprehension, the signal gets transferred into Wernicke's area and becomes interpreted. I did not find any claims problematic. However, I wish that the author explained why it is not as likely that the right hemisphere is not always dominant in left-handed people while the left hemisphere is dominant for most right-handed people.
I do not think that language is a purely biological phenomenon because we mainly learn language through interactions with other people. Without interaction with other people, we would not have the ability to communicate with others. As babies, we imitate the sounds we hear from our parents and our surroundings. However, I think that the biological features we were born with give us the ability to learn and acquire the language as we continue to hear it daily.
Generally, I process meaning through context clues. I think about the general topic of what I am reading or hearing, and I utilize other words in the sentence and try to figure out what it could mean. After reading the collocations section, it inspired me to use collocations when I am learning Korean. Through collocations, I can learn the restrictions on which lexemes go together, which can help me sound more natural when speaking and writing. Since one of my main goals this semester is to expand my vocabulary and sound more fluent, I feel that learning collocations can help me advance in my Korean language abilities.
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