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2005 LSA Institute Linguistic Society of America
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LSA.109 | From Gene to Language: Linguistic Diversity and Brain Plasticity

Ovid J. L. Tzeng
TR 1:00-2:40
location: 56-114

To many scientists, one important question of this century is how the brain enables the mind in its various creative functions, including scientific thinking itself. During the 1990s, at the molecular level, neuroscientists unraveled a great deal about the brain's intricate, interconnected cascade of electrical impulses and chemical processes. Similarly, at the cognitive level, scientists, with the help of many newly developed techniques of visualizing the neuronal activities on-line, have also mapped much of the elaborate geography of the brain and traced its sensory and cognitive pathways. Advances have been made especially in the identification of how the brain uses discrete systems for various types of leaning and of how and where memories are stored. Moreover, in recent years, some plausible explanations have been offered for the nature of dream, emotion, and consciousness. A new scientific endeavor, dubbed the cognitive neuroscience, is making its way to solve the old mind-body problem. One of the important issues in the new science concerns with the brain activities during language processing.

Cross-linguistic studies of brain functions permit us to separate universal mechanisms from language-specific content. By uncovering the range of variations that are possible under normal and abnormal conditions, cross-language studies also address the critical issues of behavioral and neural plasticity. Chinese languages, in both spoken and written forms, provide important and interesting points of reference for comparative language/brain relationships due to their unique linguistic properties. In this respect, this course intends to give a review of modern brain-imaging techniques such as fMRI, ERP, and MEG and their applications to Chinese neurolinguistic studies. Results from our laboratories as well as those of others should provide new and converging information about the functional neuroanatomy of speaking and reading Chinese.