Ling 302 Psycholinguistics

Welcome to

Course Description • Required Textbook: Fundamentals of

Psycholinguistics

• Assessment:

• Final exam: 45%

• Midterm Exam: 25%

• Quizzes: 15%

• Assignments: 15%

Questions investigated in psycholinguistics

• How do we speak?

• How do we understand speech?

• How is language represented & processed in the brain?

• How do we acquire language?

An interdisciplinary field

• Linguistics

• Psychology (developmental - cognitive)

• Speech science

Creativity

1. Understanding novel sentences. People produce novel sentences with no conscious effort

2. We can use language to communicate anything we can think of.

• Bernard Russell: “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you his parents were poor but honest” (Gleason and Ratner 1993: 9).

Language is not• Speech (mode of transmission - also writing)

• Thought (animals can think but cannot communicate; people with language impairments)

• SLI: Williams syndrome: genetically based causing severe retardation. Many aspects of cognition are deficient. But, they have good language skills, in both vocabulary and in the ability to form grammatical sentences.

• Bilinguals can use either of their languages to transmit the thoughts they want to convey.

• We think of general intelligence as the system responsible for generating the “language of thought” (Fodor 1975), and this in turn is translated into speech by our linguistic system

• Communication

• Communication is not only through language!

Characteristics of the linguistic system

• Language is a formal system for pairing signals with meanings

• The linguistic system that enables sound and meaning to be paired contains a complex and highly organized set of principles and rules.

• Language is universal (part of the biological endowment)

Characteristics of the linguistic system

• Language Acquisition: The rapid, effortless, and natural acquisition of language by children is likely a result of the fact that language is a faculty of the human brain. As the brain develops, it organizes the language the child is exposed to in ways that are common to all humans.

• In L2, a system for acquiring human language that is engaged fully during first language acquisition and again at least partially with exposure to a second language, at any time within the lifespan of an individual.

The pairing of sounds and meanings

• Three rules make up a grammar:

• Phonological rules: create words, rhythm, intonation

• Morphological & Syntactic rules: creates the structural organization of words and sentences.

Linguistics competence & performance

• L. competence: Refers to the knowledge of language that is in a person’s brain (or mind), knowledge that provides a system for pairing sound and meaning.

• L. performance: the use of such knowledge in the actual processing of sentences, by which we mean their production and comprehension

• Tomorrow: The Speech Signal (Phonological component)

Origins of Psycholinguistics • 1951: Inception of the field of psycholinguistics after a

meeting at Cornell University

• 1953: First seminar on psycholinguistics (First book having ‘psycholinguistics’ in its title: Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (Osgood and Sebeok 1954)

• Behaviorist Psychology (conditioning)

• Edward Sapir: “The psychological reality of phonemes”

Origins of Psycholinguistics • Chomsky: Speech should not be the object of study for

those who want to understand human language. Instead, the object of study should be the set of rules – in the mind (which is really an abstract term to refer to the brain) – that create sentences and underlie observable speech.

• Chomsky: Children acquire language as effortlessly as they do, not because there are any general principles of learning that apply to all organisms (as argued by behaviorist psychologists), but because this internal system of rules is biologically based in the human species (Chomsky 1975).

What’s a speech signal?The link between the speaker & the hearer; a complex task?!

Researchers think that mental processing mechanisms consulting our grammar are executed by neurophysiological operations that are specialized for the perception of speech as a

linguistic object.

A stimulus is never consciously available to us; what we are aware of is the mental percept that the stimulus gives rise to

Perceiving a linguistic representation based on the stimulus of a speech signal requires the hearer to have

linguistic competence.

Understanding a sentence derives from human knowledge of language and takes on the form of mental representations reconstructed, quite indirectly, from the physical speech signal.

Competence vs. Performance

• Competence: knowledge of grammar and lexicon

• Performance: the language processing mechanisms responsible for both acquiring and using knowledge of language.

• Our Focus: Performance

Investigating Competence

Grammar vs. Rule - A grammar is a formal description of a language, internalized as linguistic competence in language users.

- A rule in a grammar is simply a statement that captures a regularity of the language.

Language is Universal

1. The general form, subsystems, organization, and function of grammar are all universal and therefore common to all human languages.

2. All languages specific grammars are restricted by UG.

3. All languages have a lexicon

The Speech Signal

Articulatory phonetics Acoustic phonetics

Phones

Phonetic inventory

Obstruents Sonorants

Classify sounds based on:

place of articulation “Articulatory properties" manner of articulation

Voicing stops, fricatives

The Phonological Component

specifies what sound units the language uses to make words, and how those sound units are combined into syllables, words, and intonational phrases.

It has 4 roles1. Specifies the language’s phonemic inventory 2. Adds predictable phonetic details by the application of phonological rules 3. Specifies the language’s phonotactic constraints 4. Supplies Prosody

Phonemic Inventory

- The set of sound units (phonemes) that are distinctive for that language.

- Big vs. Pig (Contrastive distribution)

- Aspirated [p] vs. non aspirated [p]

- Are the aspirated P and the non-aspirated P in contrastive distribution?

- What about Korean? ︎[pul] = fire & aspirated [pul] = grass

Phonological Rules

- Rule1 (e.g.): aspiration is required for /p/ phonemes appearing in the initial position of stressed syllables. (apple - spin)

- Representations that violate the phonological principles of a language are ungrammatical.

- Rule 2: Vowels need to be lengthen when they precede a voiced consonant. (pad ; pat)

Phonotactic Constraints- Constraints on the way syllables can be created in a

particular language; and constraints on the sequences of phonemes that are possible in the language.

Prosody (Suprasegmental features)“The rhythm and intonation of speech”

A Classification of Languages based on ‘rhythm’Stress-timed: English, Dutch Syllable-timed: Spanish, French Mora-timed: Japanese

Tone: [dā ] “to hang over sth” - [dá] “to answer” - [dǎ] “to hit” - [dà] “big”

Stress: bisyllabic nouns in English typically have a trochaic stress pattern, meaning primary stress falls on the first syllable (paper - table); bisyllabic verbs typically have an iambic stress pattern, meaning that primary stress falls on the second syllable (reflect -

admire)

Intonation:My computer has wireless. My computer has wireless?

Prosody can also reflect the syntactic structure of sentences, by marking where important syntactic boundaries are placed.

(They invited Sue and Jim, and Amanda got rejected.) (They invited Sue, and Jim and Amanda got rejected.)

The Morphological ComponentMorphemes

Free Bound

Affixes - prefixes (re-) - suffixes (-s) , - infixes /sulat/ ‘write’ => /sumulat/ ‘one

who writes’, - circumfixes (ge-..-t) spielen ‘to play’ =>

gespielt ‘played’

Morphology

Inflectional Derivational

- add grammatical features (tense, gender, number, case)

Can change the meaning or the grammatical category of the stem to

which they are affixed

The Syntactic Component1. creates basic structures for sentences 2. combines simple sentences to form complex ones 3. moves elements of sentences

simple structure

consists of hierarchically organized constituents

substitution test

A basic sentence consists of a single verb and the grammatical elements required by the verb’s subcategorization frame

All verbs require at least one argument: subject (null subject languages)

Verbs & their arguments have thematic relations: agent, patient (theme)

Intransitive verbs (sleep) require only a subject, transitive verbs (hit) require two arguments: a subject + direct object; (put) requires three arguments: a subject + direct object + an

argument indicating location

The Syntactic ComponentComplex structures

They claimed that Ahmad is brilliant.Recursion

Complex sentences containing a relative clause: The musician that Ann just met dated the girl that lives across the street.

The Syntactic ComponentMovement

movement rules in syntax are structure dependent

Do support The girl fell on the ground.

Did the girl fall on the ground?

Wh- movement

The Syntactic Componentpronominal reference

Peggy noticed that Mariah kicked herself.

Peggy noticed that Mariah kicked her.

Metalinguistic awareness and the psychological reality of linguistic structure

If you can judge when a principle or rule has been violated, you can be sure that it is mentally represented somehow.

Another kind of metalinguistic skill is involved in perceiving the ambiguity of sentences.

The LexiconLexical entries also contain information about a word’s selectional restrictions.

All sorts of conceptual knowledge (including idiosyncratic things you know about the referents for words) is stored independently of lexical entries

content words function words

An extremely important aspect of a verb’s lexical representation, from a psycholinguistic point of view, is its subcategorization information. This is information about what kinds of

arguments a verb must have and which arguments are optional.

The Biological Basis of Language

• Language is an aspect of human biology.

• Eric Lenneberg: According to Lenneberg (1967: 371–4), a system is biological if:

1.  its cognitive function is species specific;

2. the specific properties of its cognitive function are replicated in every member of the species;

3. the cognitive processes and capacities associated with this system are differentiated spontaneously with maturation;

4. certain aspects of behavior and cognitive function for this system emerge only during infancy; and

5. certain social phenomena come about by spontaneous adaptation of the behavior of the growing individual to the behavior of other individuals around him.

• Language is species specific

• Arguments for it:

• No other animals talk, nor do any other animals have a gestural system with the organizational structure of human language.

• Can animals be taught a human communication system.

• Chimpanzee Washoe was taught to sign words taken from American Sign Language (Gardner and Gardner 1969; Brown 1970). Others, like the chimpanzee Lana (Rumbaugh and Gill 1976) or the bonobo Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994), have been trained on a variety of computer keyboard systems. Others, like the chimpanzee Sarah, have been taught to manipulate plastic symbols (Premack 1971, 1976)

• Some apes have been able to acquire remarkably large lexicons and use them to communicate about past events, to make simple requests, to demonstrate remarkable abilities of perception and classification, and even to lie.

• Apes have also demonstrated true symbol-using behavior (e.g., using a red plastic chip to stand for the color green) and the ability to recognize two-dimensional pictures of objects. The grey parrot Alex learned to label many objects, colors, and shapes, and also learned to combine sounds in ways that suggest some degree of awareness of the phonological units that make up speech (Pepperberg 2007).

• No animal has been able to learn a creative syntactic system.

• Washoe, the chimpanzee, learned more than a hundred individual words and could combine them communicatively to request food or play. She did not, however, order them in consistent ways to convey meaning, nor was there any evidence that her utterances had any kind of structural organization (Fodor, Bever, and Garrett 1974: 443).

• None of these animals has acquired a system that incorporates anything approaching the formal complexity of human language (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002).

• Language is Universal in Humans

• All human babies are born with a brain that is genetically pre- pared to organize linguistic information; thus, the psychological processes involved in both acquiring and using language are at play, no matter the person.

• All human languages have universal properties.

• Language universals are a product of human neurology. Thus, a person’s ability to acquire and use language is as natural as a person’s ability to walk or a bird’s ability to fly.

• To examine directly whether humans can acquire rules that do not conform to Universal Grammar, a group of researchers attempted to teach a possible and an (impossible) made-up language to a polyglot savant – a person with an extraordinary talent for acquiring languages (Smith, Tsimpli, and Ouhalla 1993). For this investigation, the extraordinary language learner, Christopher, was exposed to Berber (a language spoken in North Africa, but which Christopher had never learned) and Epun (a language the experimenters invented for the study, containing rules that violated certain aspects of Universal Grammar). The researchers found that while Christopher learned Berber easily, he found it difficult to learn certain types of rules in Epun, particularly rules that violated structure dependency.

• Language Need Not Be Taught, Nor Can It Be Suppressed

• Language does not need to be taught, and acquisition cannot be suppressed.

• Case Study: two brothers, Glen & Jim, who were the hearing children of deaf parents

• Situation: The boys were well cared for and did not suffer emotional deprivation, but they had little experience with spoken language other than from watching television.

• When Discovered: Jim (18 months old at the time) did not speak, and Glen (3 years, 9 months old) knew and used words, but his morphology and sentence structure were virtually non-existent. Glen would produce sentences such as the following:

• (1) a. That enough two wing. b. Off my mittens. c. This not take off plane.

• What happened? Speech-language pathologists from the University of Connecticut visited the home regularly and had conversations with the children. They did not attempt to teach them any particular language patterns, but they played with them and interacted linguistically with them. In 6 months, Glen’s language was age-appropriate and Jim acquired normal language.

• The story of Glen and Jim illustrates the importance of interactive input for children during the years they are acquiring language. It also illustrates the fact that specific teaching is not necessary.

• The biologically driven processes of language acquisition even drive the creation of new languages

• Case of Nicaraguan Sign Language (Pidgin to Creole)

• Children Everywhere Acquire Language on a Similar Developmental Schedule

• “Children and language: They learn the same all around the world” (Slobin 1972).

• infants roll over, sit up, crawl, and walk at similar ages everywhere!

• Babies coo in the first half of their first year and begin to babble in the second half.

• The first word comes in the first half of the second year for just about everyone.

• In all societies, babies go through a one-word stage, followed by a period of early sentences of increasing length.

• Finally, complex sentences begin. By the age of 5 the basic structures of the language are in place, although fine-tuning goes on until late childhood.

• Children all over the world are sensitive to the same kinds of language properties, such as word order and inflection. They make remarkably few errors, but their errors are of a similar type.

• Sheeps! Eated!

• There seems to be a critical period in the acquisition of their first language.

• The evidence for this comes from reports of so-called “wild children,” particularly from the case of Genie, a California girl who was locked in a closet by an abusive father for the first 13 years of her life (Curtiss et al. 1974; Curtiss 1977, 1988). During that time, Genie was deprived of any linguistic input of any kind. After she was rescued, in November 1970, researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles worked for years with her to help her acquire English, but to no avail. She acquired words and the ability to communicate verbally, but she never acquired the full morphological and syntactic system of English. Examples of her utterances in illustrate the level of her language ability:

• Genie full stomach. Applesauce buy store. Want Curtiss play piano.Genie have mama have baby grow up.

• Genie was quite friendly and used language well socially. Her problems were solely in morphology and syntax, the formal aspects of language structure that researchers suspect are subject to critical period effects.

• L2 acquisition? A critical period?

• Language Development Is Triggered by the Environment

• Certain biological systems will not develop without environmental stimuli to trigger them. Children will not develop language if language is not accessible in their environment or nobody is there to interact with them.

• For a biological system, the environmental input is a stimulus that triggers internal development.

Anatomical and Physiological Correlates for Language

• Localization

• Franz Joseph Gall

• Paul Broca (Tan-Tan; Aphasia)

• Carl Wernicke (Aphasia: fluent but incomprehensible speech)

• Neurolinguistics

• Broca’s aphasia: Agrammatic speech +(comprehend)

• Wernicke’s aphasia

• The apple the boy is eating is red.

• The girl the boy is chasing is tall.

• People with aphasia compensate for their impaired grammatical processing system by using real-world knowledge to figure out the meanings of sentences in discourse.

• Researchers have found people with agrammatic aphasia whose metalinguistic skills with respect to syntax are better than their ability to produce syntactically complex sentences (Linebarger, Schwartz, and Saffran 1983).

• Users of Signed Languages can be aphasic (trouble with hand?!)

• Language Lateralization

• The language function is located in one of the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex.

• Most in left hemisphere; few in the right, and a very few not lateralized

• Left-handed people being more likely than right-handed people to have language lateralized in the right hemisphere.

• Control of the body is contralateral

• How to determine the localization of language in the brain?

• Wada test: sodium amytol is injected into one of the two hemispheres of a patient’s brain. The patient is asked to count or name pictures presented on an overhead screen. Because each hemisphere controls the functioning of the opposite side of the body, the injection produces paralysis on the side of the body opposite from the affected hemisphere. The injection also disrupts verbal behavior, only briefly if the non-dominant hemisphere has been injected, but for several minutes if it has been the dominant hemisphere.

• Study (Rasmussen and Milner 1977): 262 people who were administered the Wada test

• Findings:

• 96% of right-handers had language lateralized in the left hemisphere - 4% on the right hemisphere

• 70% of left-handers in the sample were left-lateralized, 15% were right lateralized, and 15% had language func t ion loca ted in bo th hemispheres.

• Brain Mapping: Developed by Penfield and Roberts in the 1950s

• Patients are given a spinal anesthetic so they will be able to communicate with the clinician. The skull is opened and the brain is exposed, but because the brain itself has no nerve endings, this is not a painful procedure. Various areas are marked along the surface of the brain, and a brief electric current is administered at the same time the patient is performing a verbal task.

• The case of commissurotomy (severing the corpus callosum) (split-brains)

• Experimental techniques for studying the effects of lateralization in intact brains.

1. visual field studies

2. dichotic listening studies

3. neuroimaging

• Visual Field Studies:

• Study:Gazzaniga and Hillyard 1971 (match between the sentence and the image)

The boy kisses the girl. The girl kisses the boy.

The girl is drinking. The girl will drink.

The dog jumps over the fence. The dogs jump over the fence.

• Finding: Left hemisphere is dominant in language processing

• Right hemisphere can process rudimentary lexical information.

• It cannot rhyme.

• No representation of formal aspects of language.

• Dichotic Listening:

• The right-ear advantage for language.

• It occurs because a linguistic signal presented to the right ear arrives in the left hemisphere for decoding by a more direct route than does a signal presented to the left ear. From the left ear, the signal must travel first to the right hemisphere, then across the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere (Kimura 1961, 1973).

• Non-speech signals produce no ear advantage, and musical stimuli demonstrate a left-ear advantage (Kimura 1964).

• Lateralization, when does it happen?

• The left hemisphere is larger than the right before birth, and infants are better able to distinguish speech from non-speech when the stimuli are presented to the left hemisphere (Molfese 1973; Entus 1975).

• Early language appears not to be lateralized until the age of about 2. If the left hemisphere is damaged in infancy, the right hemisphere can take over its function.

• The ability of parts of the young brain to assume functions usually associated with other areas is called plasticity.

• Who recovers left hemisphere damage without having aphasia, children or adults?

• Studies have shown that children with a removed left hemisphere are deficient in the formal aspects of language morphology and syntax. Thus, the right hemisphere may be limited in its plasticity in that it cannot incorporate the structural analytical aspects of language associated with the left hemisphere (Dennis and Whitaker 1976).

• Ch2: Neuroscience of learning

• The central nervous system (CNS)

• What’s the function of the spinal cord?

• The autonomic nervous system (ANS)

• Neural Organization

w h a t m a k e s n e u ro n s different from other cell (e.g. skin)?

Glial cells: housekeeping!

Synapse= axon_dendrite Axon: neurotransmitters Synaptic gap

A c t i o n P o t e n t i a l : t h e process begins as an electrical reaction in the neuron and axon, changes to a chemical reaction in t h e g a p , a n d t h e n reconverts to an electrical response in the dendrite.

• Brain Structure

• Brain Research Methods

• Neurophysiology of Learning

• Information Processing System:

Sensory Registrars

Short (Working) Memory

Long Term Memory

• Pattern Recognition: input sent as a neural perception of the it.

• The brain’s reticular activating system filters information to exclude trivial information and focus on important material (what are the factors that influence this filtering?)

• Perceived importance

• Novelty

• Intensity

• Movement

• The parts of the brain primarily involved in memory and information processing are the cortex and the medial temporal lobe.

• Declarative Memory vs. Procedural Memory

• With declarative information, the sensory registers in the cerebral cortex (e.g., visual, auditory) receive the input and transfer it to the hippocampus and the nearby medial temporal lobe.

• The hippocampus is not the ultimate storage site; it acts as a processor and conveyor of inputs.

• With multiple activations, the memories form neural networks that become strongly embedded in the frontal and temporal cortexes.

• Much procedural information becomes automatized such that procedures can be accomplished with little or no conscious awareness (e.g., typing, riding a bicycle).

• Initial procedural learning involves the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the cerebellum, which ensure that we consciously attend to the movements or steps and that these movements or steps are assembled correctly.

• With practice, these areas show less activity and other brain structures, such as the motor cortex, become more involved.

Memory Networks• Learning involves forming and strengthening neural

connections and networks (synaptic connections).

• Hebb’s Theory: Hebb (1949) formulated a neurophysiological theory of learning that highlights the role of two cortical structures: cell assemblies and phase sequences

• A cell assembly is a structure that includes cells in the cortex and subcortical centers (Hilgard, 1956).

• A phase sequence is a series of cell assemblies.

Neural Connections• The process of forming and strengthening synaptic

connections (learning) changes the physical structure of the brain and alters its functional organization (National Research Council, 2000).

• Consolidation: Memory formation is a continuous process in which neural connections are stabilized over a period of time (Wolfe, 2001). The process of stabilizing and strengthening neural (synaptic) connections is known as consolidation. The hippocampus appears to play a key role in consolidation, despite the fact that the hippocampus is not where memories are stored.

Brain Development• Factors influencing brain development:

A. Genetics

B. Environmental Stimulation

C. Nutrition

D. Teratogens

Phases of Brain Development

• Prenatal brain development: most between 4th and 7th month

• At birth: 1 million connections (60%)

• 2 yrs old: As many synapses as an adult

• 3 yrs old: Billions more than adults

• 18 yrs old: Lost half the billions

• By the age of 5 years: the child’s brain has acquired a language and developed sensory motor skills and other competencies.

Phases of Brain Development

• Teenage yrs: The frontal lobes are maturing, and the parietal lobes increase in size. The prefrontal cortex, which controls judgments and impulses, matures slowly

• Teenage yrs: There also are changes in neurotransmitters— especially dopamine—that can leave the brain more sensitive to the pleasurable effects of drugs and alcohol.

• Teenage yrs: There is a thickening of brain cells and massive reorganizations of synapses, which makes this a key time for learning. The “use it or lose it” strategy results in brain regions becoming strengthened through practice (e.g., practicing the piano thickens neurons in the brain region controlling the fingers) (Wallis, 2004).

Critical Periods• Five aspects of brain development for which there

seem to be critical periods are:

• Language

• Emotions

• Sensory Motor Development

• Auditory Development

• Vision

• Neuroanatomical correlates of language processing

• Neuroimaging research focuses on identifying neuroanatomical correlates for the competence repositories and performance mechanisms for language.

• While the brain is at work, active neurons emit electrical activity. This voltage can be measured by attaching electrodes to the scalp at different locat ions; the technical term for th is is electroencephalography (EEG).

• Event-related potentials (or ERPs, for short) are changes in the electrical patterns of the brain that are associated with the processing of various kinds of linguistic stimuli.

• Collected measurements provide information about:

1. the timing

2. the direction (positive or negative)

3. the amplitude of the voltage.

• N400 component

• This component is sensitive to semantic anomalies, such as the ones in (1a) and (1b), compared to (1c) (Kutas and Van Petten 1988):

• 1a: *The pizza was too hot to cry.

• 1b: *The pizza was too hot to drink.

• 1c: The pizza was too hot to eat.

• Studies investigating morphological and syntactic anomalies have discovered ERP components associated with structural processing (Friederici 2002).

• Morphosyntactic errors, like subject–verb agreement violations, elicit a left anterior negativity (LAN), which occurs between 300 and 500milliseconds.

• Another ERP component linked to syntactic structure building is a very early left anterior negativity (ELAN). At around 150–200milliseconds, the ELAN is even earlier than the LAN, and is characterized by electrical activity that is more negative when building syntactic structure is not possible, as in (1a), compared to (1b) (Neville et al. 1991):

• 1a: Max’s of proof

• 1b: Max’s proof

• A late centro-parietal positivity, the P600 component (for positive voltage between 600 and 1000milliseconds, also called the Syntactic Positive Shift, or SPS), is elicited with syntactic violations (Osterhout and Holcomb 1992), with sentences that require reanalysis, and with sentences that are syntactically complex (Friederici 2002).

• the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is an ERP component linked to the processing of prosodic phrasing: intonational boundaries inside sentences elicit positivity (Steinhauer, Alter, and Friederici 1999).

• A different ERP component, the P800, is elicited when the intonation of a sentence does not match its form, for example, when a question has the intonation of a declarative, or vice versa (Artésano, Besson, and Alter 2004).

• Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) provide detailed information about the areas of the brain implicated in language processing.

• These technologies measure blood flow levels, capitalizing on the fact that increased neuronal activity in a particular area of the brain is supported by increased blood flow.

• fMRI data provide topographical information about what regions of the brain are specialized for different aspects of language representation and processing tasks.

• ERPs are useful to study the time course of processing, while fMRI is better at detecting the areas of the brain that are involved in processing tasks

• Genetic Bases of Language

• Gopnik (1990, 1997) showed that members of over three generations of one family had suffered from specific language impairment (SLI), dyslexia, and other language disorders, indicating that genetic anomalies associated with language development can be inherited.

• FOXP2

• Members of the family exhibited symptoms like those of agrammatic aphasics: effortful and non-fluent speech, lacking in syntactic organization. Their grammar appeared to be broadly impaired; they had difficulty manipulating phonemes and morphemes and understanding complex sentences (Watkins, Dronkers, and Vargha-Khadem 2002).

• The FOXP2 gene is associated with the development of other parts of human anatomy unrelated to language, including the lung, the gut, and the heart. It is also a gene that is not confined to Homo sapiens; it is also found in other mammals, including mice (Marcus and Fisher 2003).