Experiments and Phenomena
This famous test asks participants to name the ink color rather than read the word.
What is the Stroop task?
For most right-handed people, language is primarily processed in this hemisphere.
What is the left hemisphere?
What is rain vs reign?
This disorder involves difficulty producing speech despite good comprehension.
What is Broca's aphasia?
This area in the left frontal lobe is essential for speech production.
What is Broca's area?
This brain phenomenon describes how experience changes neural connections during language learning.
What is neuroplasticity?
The right hemisphere contributes most strongly to this aspect of language meaning.
What is prosody (intonation/emotional tone)?
body tissue vs shellfish
What is mussel vs muscle?
This disorder involves fluent but meaningless speech and poor comprehension.
What is Wernicke's aphasia?
This white matter bundle connects Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.
What is the arcuate fasciculus?
This is the period early in life when language learning is easiest.
What is the critical period?
This condition, caused by severing the corpus callosum, reveals lateralized language functions.
What is split-brain syndrome?
rule or truth vs head of a school
What is principle vs principal?
This disorder affects the ability to repeat words, often linked to damage in the arcuate fasciculus.
What is conduction aphasia?
This area in the temporal lobe is responsible for understanding spoken language.
What is Wernicke's area?
This imaging method measures changes in blood oxygenation levels to infer brain activity during language tasks.
What is fMRI?
When the right hemisphere processes prosody, it mainly uses this lobe of the brain.
What is the temporal lobe?
dispatched vs smell
What is sent vs scent?
This disorder causes difficulty understanding and producing speech after widespread left-hemisphere damage, often combining symptoms of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia.
What is global aphasia?
This gyrus, located in the superior temporal lobe, processes auditory input.
What is the superior temporal gyrus?
In this illusion, watching someone’s mouth move changes what sound you think you hear.
What is the McGurk effect?
In split-brain studies, a picture shown to this visual field can be drawn but not named.
What is the left visual field?
to drag along vs a key part of human balance
This reading disorder makes it difficult to recognize written words even when vision is normal.
What is dyslexia?
This pathway model describes how the brain separates the “what” and “how” of language into ventral and dorsal streams.
What is the dual-stream model of language processing?