Michele Miozzo's Courses
In order to produce a sentence, speakers have to formulate
a representation of the message they want to express, retrieve the meaning,
syntactic properties and sound of the words, plan the sentence structure,
order the words according to specific rules and finally, activate motor
plans for articulation. This course reviews the current theories that
describe the various processes underlying language production. These theories
are traditionally based on the analyses of naming latencies and speech
errors, and on the outcomes of computer simulations. This course also
examines the pattern of performance of brain-damaged patients with selective
deficits in language production. The importance of the latter types of
data is twofold: they provide the empirical evidence needed to formulate
hypotheses about the organization of processes for language production
in the brain and in several cases they challenge dominant psycholinguistic
theories.
The course addresses two issues: (a) the psychological processes
that underlie the comprehension and production of words and sentences,
reading and writing; and (b) the organization of these processes in the
brain. The course reviews the experimental approaches adopted in psycholinguistics
to investigate various linguistic tasks and the experimental findings
that are at the basis of current models of language processing. The performance
of brain-damaged patients with deficits selectively affecting a given
language function (e.g., oral naming or reading) are also considered.
The analyses of these deficits can be used to constrain models of language
processing and to develop theories about the functional architecture of
language mechanisms in the brain. To determine the brain regions related
to language and meaning, some recent investigations make use of neuroimaging
techniques such as positron emission tomography, functional magnetic imaging
and event-related potential. The relevance of neuroimaging data for psychological
and neurological theories of language processing is discussed. The course
also surveys topics related to language acquisition, reading deficits
(dyslexias), writing deficits (agraphias) and bilingualism.
There are brain-damaged patients who systematically exchange
the left and right parts of the objects with which they interact. Other
patients can see only one half of an object, or can eat only from one
half of the plate. Neuroscientists believe that such cases can help us
understand how the brain represents the space in which we live and move
and in which we locate objects and events. Philosophers view the representation
of space as a privileged entry point into the study of the external world.
The aim of this seminar is to bring together these neuroscientific and
philosophical perspectives in a joint effort to better understand the
two sides of space: its inner representation in the brain and its outer
realization in the objects around us.
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