Neurolinguistics

Objectives:
• To familiarize the student with central issues in brain and language research (from healthy and brain-damaged populations)
• To prepare the student to evaluate data from neurolinguistic and brain imaging studies
•To prepare the student to design and conduct experimental work in Slovenian and other languages
• To improve the student's written and oral presentation skills

The student should have taken at least two courses out of Phonetics and Phonology, Syntax and Semantics (or equivalent), or should have permission from the instructor. This course is related to other courses in the Linguistics track, in particular Psycholinguistics.

Lectures cover the following topics:
Introduction: goals & aims of the course. Historical Info. Basic brain anatomy.
Aphasias (diagnosis, symptoms, therapy). Broca's aphasia. Wernicke's aphasia. Aphasia & syntactic processing.
Methods and Techniques of Neuroimaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET).
Language in normal ageing and in dementia (AD, PD, MCI, PPA, FTD).
Language in the Right Hemisphere.

The aim of Tutorials is to work on specific linguistic questions according to the students' interests.
Tutorial structure:
• Theoretical and experimental background on the chosen topics (discussion of current neurolinguistic literature on the theoretical topics).
• Formulation of testable hypotheses, experimental design.
• Creation of stimulus sets.
• Set-up of experiments& recruitment of population.
• Pilot testing and data analysis.

At the end of the course, students will:
• be familiar with the historical and current issues in studying the neuroanatomical substrates associated with language processing
• be aquainted with the various methodologies involved in the study of language and the brain
• be able to design and conduct an experiment in order to test a theoretical hypothesis or to investigate the language abilities of neurologically impaired populations.

• Ingram, John C.L. 2007. Neurolinguistics: an introduction to spoken language processing and its disorders. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Stemmer, Brigitte, & Whitaker, Harry A. (eds) 2008. Handbook of the neuroscience of language. Amsterdam, Boston: Elsevier.
• Ahlsén, Elisabeth. 2006.Introduction to neurolinguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.

• Pulvermüller, Friedemann. 2002.The neuroscience of language: on brain circuits of words and serial order. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

• Recent topical journal articles

• Class notes

Written exam or final project (70%), assignments and quizes (30%).

Assist. prof. dr. Christina Manouilidou lectures and conducts research in psycho- and neurolinguistics in the Linguistics Division of the Department of Philology of the University of Patras, Greece. Recently, her research has focused on the following areas: (1) cognitive and linguistic impairments in aging populations with chronic neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease, Semantic Dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia and related dementias; (2) Lexical access and representation of derived words, compound words and pseudo-words; (3) investigation of the role of Broca's area in language and memory by looking at behavioral and electrophysiological data from healthy and brain-damaged populations.

Selection of articles:
Manouilidou, C. & de Almeida, R.G. (in press, 2013). Processing correlates of verb typologies: investigating internal structure and argument realization. To appear in Linguistics 51(4).

Fyndanis, V., Manouilidou, C., Koufou, E., Tsapakis E-M. (2013). Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer’s disease: evidence from Tense, Agreement and Aspect. Aphasiology 27(2): 178-200.

Marjanovic, K., Manouilidou, C. & Marvin, T. (2013). Word-Formation Rules in Slovenian Agentive Deverbal Nominalization: A Psycholinguistic Study Based on Pseudo-Words. Slovene Linguistic Studies 9: 93-109.

Manouilidou, C., Ralli, A. & Kordouli, K. (2012). Coordinative compounds in Greek: lexical access and representation. Lingue and Linguaggio XI (2): 235-250.

Ferstl, E.C., Garnham, A. & C. Manouilidou (2011). Implicit Causality Bias in English: A corpus of 300 verbs. Behavior Research Methods 43(1): 124-135.

Manouilidou, C., de Almeida, R.G., Schwartz, G., & NPV Nair (2009). Thematic Roles in Alzheimer’s Disease: Hierarchy Violations in Psychological Predicates. Journal of Neurolinguistics 22(2): 167-186.