Speaking on the brain and language in children and adults, Bates, a professor of psychology and of cognitive science, argued that grammar or language resides not only in the Broca region of the brain, but is broadly distributed throughout the brain. She presented studies involving cross-linguistic grammaticality judgment scores in individuals with a language disorder called Broca's aphasia. She found these individuals are better at catching word order errors than agreement errors and that those abilities differ with different languages having different rules. Even when the Broca region is damaged, some language ability is preserved. When studying the brain and language in children and adults, Bates urged listeners to move beyond a phrenological framework that asserts each of the mental faculties is located in a definite part of the cerebral cortex.
Brains learn like lungs breathe and hearts pump blood.
Language is a distributed dynamic skill system overlaid on a sensory motor brain that evolved for many things. For more information, contact Dr. Judith Cooper, 496-5061.