After reading David Crystal’s articles on “How the brain handles language” and “How we mean and How we analyze meaning” I learned a great deal about the biomechanics behind language comprehension and usage as well as the intricacies of how we process meaning and convey our thoughts relative to the world around us. One question that I pondered as I read the text was the significant disparity between homogeneity in right-handed people where 95% of estimates show dominance in the left hemisphere of the brain for language whereas in left-handed people, 60% of estimates show that their left hemisphere is either dominant or very involved in language as well.
No, I do not think language is a purely biological phenomenon. While biology does play a crucial role in our ability to perceive, understand, and effectively use language for communication, it does not tell us much about the origins of language or how it came to be. Since human beings are the only species currently known to be able to form and communicate such complex thoughts and emotions in a ‘fairly’ standardized manner, it follows that civilization, ethnic roots, and cultural heritage all played a significant role in shaping modern languages.
There are several areas of the brain that play a vital role in the production and comprehension of speech. There is Broca’s area in the left hemisphere of the brain responsible for speech production and articulation. Connected to Broca’s area is Wernicke’s area in the posterior superior temporal lobe which is responsible mainly for comprehension. Finally, the angular gyrus allows us to incorporate auditory, visual, and sensory information to language related information.
We conceptualize or process meaning through semantics—through collocations and sense relations between lexemes which are the basic lexical units of a language. Collocations are the tendency of certain lexemes to occur in sequence. As we discussed in class, if someone says the word “for” most people think of the next word to be “example” and I think that is recognition pattern helps us in logically understanding the context of what is being said. There are many different types of sense relations but one of the most commonly known ones would be synonymy i.e., words that are similar but not the same. As mentioned in the text, car and automobile are viable substitutes thus, if I were to know what a car is and that the word automobile is a synonym for car then I would be perfectly capable of understanding the sentence “I got a new automobile today” even though this is not the commonly spoken way of expressing that particular idea.
A part of the text I found particularly interesting was about distinguishing “sense” from “reference.” As I advance in my foreign language studies, I will keep in the mind the importance of explaining a word’s meaning in sense as opposed to in reference to avoid future confusions or wrongful deductions based solely on observation. For example, rather than pointing to a pen to explain what a pen is, it is more beneficial to break it down into something like “An object containing ink that helps me write on paper.”
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