Neurolinguistics (G) Fall 2020

Instructor

Prof. Liina Pylkkänen
liina.pylkkanen@nyu.edu

Weekly Schedule:

Asynchronous
Watch the lectures & do the reading before Thu class.

THU discussion with LP:
Thu 2:00pm-(up till 4:45pm, depending on the week)
Zoom or in-person

Course description

This is an advanced introduction to the cognitive neuroscience of human language. Lectures and discussion on central topics in the neurobiology of language processing and on foundational questions having to do with the relationship between experimental and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Literature and ongoing research on auditory perception, lexical access and syntactic/semantic processing are discussed. In addition to surveying existing results, the course is heavily focused on discussing what kinds of questions about language processing and representation can be investigated with the currently available neurobiological methods/knowledge. Basic neuroanatomy, functional imaging techniques and behavioral measures of cognition are introduced.

Requirements

Attendance

Regular attendance in the synchronous Thu sessions. Students arrive into the synchronous session having

watched the lecture-videos

done the readings

emailed LP a question/topic they’d like to discuss by 5pm WED

Background lectures

The lectures of the parallel undergraduate version of this course form a background for your readings. Links to lectures are posted below.

Readings

All readings are available on this website. You must be on the NYU network to access most journal articles.

Course project

For your course project, you will work in small groups to design an MEG experiment, create the stimulus materials, and, hopefully, collect some preliminary data. The final paper will be a progress report of your study. In addition, review type papers are also possible.

Deadlines

By Oct-9, meet with LP to discuss your project ideas

Oct-22: In-class progress report on your project

Dec-10: In-class final report on your project

Dec-15 5pm: Final papers are due (progress report on the project)

Your well-being during the pandemic

This semester, we’ll be charting unknown territory together. You may experience challenges that will affect your ability to study and do your work. The earlier you let me know about your challenges, the better my chances to help you.

Anti-Racism Pledge

I will be brave enough to have uncomfortable conversations and take action against racism at NYU.

Schedule and course materials:

DATE	TOPIC	VIDEOS (watch before READING)	READ1	READ2	READ3
3-Sep	ORIENTATION TO HOW THE COURSE WILL WORK (zoom, most likely)
10-Sep	INTRO and BRAIN BASICS	SET 1 on YouTube just slides Interactive Brain extra: Pylkkanen 2020 CUNY talk (syn-sem)	Small & Hickock: The Neurobiology of Language	Dikker, S., Assaneo, M. F., Gwilliams, L., Wang, L., & Kösem, A. (2020). Magnetoencephalography and Language. Neuroimaging Clinics, 30(2), 229-238.
17-Sep	METHODS I: Early aphasiology and the Classic Model	SET 2 on YouTube just slides	Wilson, S. & Fridriksson, J. Aphasia and aphasia recovery. In Gazzaniga et al (Eds.) The Cognitive Neurosciences Sixth Edition. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.	S&H Chapter 74:Psycholinguistic Approaches to the Study of Syndromes and Symptoms of Aphasia (Blumstein)
24-Sep	METHODS II: Neuroimaging and electrophysiology	SET 3 on YouTube just slides	Hämäläinen, M., Hari, R., Ilmoniemi, R. J., Knuutila, J., & Lounasmaa, O. V. (1993). Magnetoencephalography—theory, instrumentation, and applications to noninvasive studies of the working human brain. Reviews of modern Physics, 65(2), 413.	Flinker, A. et al (2015). Redefining the role of Broca’s area in speech. PNAS.
1-Oct	SPEECH	SET 4 on YouTube just slides	Phillips, C. et al. (2000). Auditory Cortex Accesses Phonological Categories: An MEG Mismatch Study. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 12: 1038-1055.	Mesgarani, N., Cheung, C., Johnson, K., & Chang, E. F. (2014). Phonetic feature encoding in human superior temporal gyrus. Science, 343(6174), 1006-1010.
8-Oct	READING	SET 5 on YouTube just slides	McCandliss, B. D., Cohen, L., & Dehaene, S. (2003). The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 293-299.	Rajalingham, R. et al. (2020). A potential cortical precursor of visual word form recognition in untrained monkeys. Nature Comm.
15-Oct	LEXICAL ACCESS	SET 6 on YouTube just slides	Pylkkänen, L., & Marantz, A. (2003). Tracking the time course of word recognition with MEG. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(5), 187-189.	Desai, R. et al.(2018). The multifaceted abstract brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1752), 20170122.	Borghesani, V., Buiatti, M., Eger, E., & Piazza, M. (2019). Conceptual and perceptual dimensions of word meaning are recovered rapidly and in parallel during reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 31(1), 95-108.
22-Oct	Project progress reports (full length session)
29-Oct	MORPHOLOGY	SET 7 on YouTube just slides	Zweig, E., & Pylkkänen, L. (2009). A visual M170 effect of morphological complexity.	Solomyak, O., & Marantz, A. (2010). Evidence for early morphological decomposition in visual word recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(9), 2042-57.	Yablonski, M., & Ben-Shachar, M. (2020). Sensitivity to word structure in adult Hebrew readers is associated with microstructure of the ventral reading pathways. Cortex.
5-Nov	SYNTAX & SEMANTICS: CLASSICS	SET 8 on YouTube just slides	Kaan, E. & Swaab, T.Y. (2002). The brain circuitry of syntactic comprehension, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(8), 350-356.	Stromswold, K., Caplan, D., Alpert, N., & Rauch, S. (1996). Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain and Language, 52(3), 452-473.	Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(2), 78-84.
12-Nov	SYNTAX-SEMANTICS: BASIC COMPOSITION	SET 9 on YouTube just slides	Bemis, D. K., & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Simple composition: A magnetoencephalography investigation into the comprehension of minimal linguistic phrases. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(8), 2801-2814.	Pylkkänen, L. (2019). The neural basis of combinatory syntax and semantics. Science, 366(6461), 62-66.
19-Nov	THE BILINGUAL BRAIN	SET 10 on YouTube just slides	Blanco-Elorrieta, E., & Pylkkänen, L. (2017). Bilingual language switching in the laboratory versus in the wild: The spatiotemporal dynamics of adaptive language control. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(37), 9022-9036.	Declerck, M., Wen, Y., Snell, J., Meade, G., & Grainger, J. (2020). Unified syntax in the bilingual mind. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27(1), 149-154.
26-Nov	THANKSGIVING
3-Dec	SIGN LANGUAGE	SET 11 on YouTube just slides	[pdf coming] Emmorey, K. & MacSweeney, M. (2020)The Neurobiology of Sign Language Processing. In Gazzaniga MS, Mangun GR, Poeppel D, editors. The Cognitive Neurosciences VI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2020.	Blanco-Elorrieta, E., Kastner, I., Emmorey, K., & Pylkkänen, L. (2018). Shared neural correlates for building phrases in signed and spoken language. Scientific reports, 8(1), 1-10.
DEC-10	Final Project Presentations (full length session)