Neural Bases of Language Course Website

Neural Bases of Language Spring 2005

Instructors

Description

Requirements

Grading

Schedule & Readings

Lecture notes

Students' questions

Neural Bases of Language, V61.0043-001

TR 3:30-4:45, 145F 204

Instructors

Prof. Liina Pylkkänen, liina.pylkkanen@nyu.edu,
office hours Tues 10:30am-12pm in 870 Meyer

TA: Eytan Zweig, ez255@nyu.edu,
office hours Wed 1-3 in 719 B'way Rm 446

Lab assistant: Jesse Harris, jh146@nyu.edu

Course description

What are the brain bases of our ability to speak and understand language? Are some parts of the brain dedicated to language? What is it like to lose language? This course provides a state-of-the-art survey of the cognitive neuroscience of language, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field in the intersection of Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Neuroscience. Lectures cover all aspects of language processing in the healthy brain from early sensory perception to higher level semantic interpretation as well as a range of neurological and development language disorders, including aphasias, dyslexia and genetic language impairment. Functional neuroimaging techniques will be introduced and the course includes a small lab component where students gain hands-on experience analyzing brain data.

Requirements

Questions: Due every Sunday at midnight (email to: eytanz@nyu.edu)

The main goal of this course is to get you thinking critically about language in the brain. When you start doing this, you’ll come up with all sorts of questions. We want to find out what those questions are! Because of this, the most important requirement for this class is to send the TA three questions every week. The questions are due every Sunday at midnight. The questions should be of three sorts:

1. An open ended research question/ project idea

Good open-ended research questions connect to the course material and are more specific than questions like “Is language special?”. Your open-ended research question cannot be the same question that was the topic of the debate in recitation.
Bonus: Come up with a specific project idea that relates to the open-ended research question.
Good project ideas connect to the course material and are executable, given currently available techniques and methods. Examples of projects that wouldn’t be easily executable: anything that requires invasive methods (e.g., intracranial recordings), anything that requires access to a very specific clinical population, anything that is overly uncomfortable for subjects (and thus wouldn’t get IRB approval), anything for which stimuli be impossible to construct, etc., you get the idea.
Bonus: Give examples of the stimuli & tasks that would serve to test the hypothesis.

2. A short answer question

3. A multiple choice question

Good short answer and multiple choice questions are answerable given the content of the lectures and readings but require non-superficial understanding of the material (rather than just memorization of sentences).

In the exams, we will use your own questions, as explained below. In other words, you get to write your own exams!

Exams

Exam questions will be compiled from the short answer and multiple-choice questions that you yourselves wrote! Before the exam, we will distribute a list of all the questions you’ve sent to the TA. A subset of those will be used as exam questions. So if you make sure you know all the answers to the questions on the list, you’ll have guaranteed an A. We’ll also incrementally post the questions online, so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to study in advance.

Recitations

Recitations serve two main functions: (i) they provide technical background for the MEG labs and (ii) they serve as a forum for discussion. Further, there will be 2-3 quizzes. What happens in recitation will always be announced in Thursday’s class.

In most recitations the class will be divided into teams, both of which will be assigned a position in some on-going debate in the field. The debate and the positions will be announced in Thursday’s class, but you will not find out what position you’ll need to defend until Friday’s recitation. So be ready to defend (and argue against) both!

Labs

This course has two labs, carried out in groups of 3 or 4. You will be divided into these groups in your first recitation.

The first lab is an MEG demo at Bellevue hospital, during which you’ll learn how the MEG lab is operated. With the lab manager, you’ll collect a set of data on an experiment that will be our collective “course project.” This lab will be carried out in the time slot of the recitation. Thus, until April, one group will always be in the MEG lab during recitation. So everyone will miss the discussion or quiz of one recitation. We’ll obviously take that into account in grading.

In the second lab, you’ll analyze one subject’s data for the “course project.” This lab is a homework. Via the Neurolinguistics lab manager (Jesse Harris), you’ll need to book one of the data analysis computers in the Neurolinguistics Lab for about 3 hours. You’ll will do a complete analysis of one subject’s data (detailed instructions will be provided). In the final class, you’ll present this analysis to the whole class as a Powerpoint presentation. By the time of the final class, the TA will also have compiled all the results and will present the group analysis for this project. So then we’ll see whether we have results!

Instructions for completing Lab 2. Location: Neurolinguistics Lab, 719 Broadway Rm 446