Understanding how the brain handles language is an important aspect to consider when one is learning a new language. I have taken psychology classes which have discussed this concept with a great deal of emphasis on the biological makeup of these processes that allow us to speak, learn, and interpret things, people, and events. Based on Crystal’s work entitled, “How Language Works,” I gained a new perspective on how significant the relationship between the brain’s two hemispheres is. In relation to language and cerebral dominance, it is stated that the left hemisphere is dominant for language in most right-handed people. Yet this does not automatically mean that the right hemisphere is dominant for language in left-handed people. As a right-handed individual, this was very interesting to read about and also to learn that the left hemisphere is found to be dominant in activities such as analytical tasks, complex motor functions, and language for people who are right-handed while the right hemisphere is dominant for creative sensibility and emotional expression or recognition.
In the section entitled “How We Mean,” I learned many new words. One of the ones which stood out to me the most was “collocation.” This relates to a relationship derived from the way in which lexemes occur in sequences. For example, in English we say that we are “green with envy” although we are not literally green. Collocations differ greatly between languages and provide major difficulty in mastering foreign languages. In the section entitled “How to Investigate Language Structure,” I enjoyed learning about a stable and structured way to learn language. It was interesting to learn about the four-level models of language (phonetics, phonology, grammar, and semantics). It is necessary to have a great structure or “gameplan” before one starts on any project; therefore these articles will be of great use to me when I begin to create my language plan for learning Korean.
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