1-2 Familiarity and Its Neural Instantiation

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From the course by University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

130 ratings

University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

130 ratings

This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

From the lesson

Week 1

Office Hours 117:05

1-1 Introduction1:28

1-2 Familiarity and Its Neural Instantiation2:23

1-3 Age of Acquisition7:01

1-4 Beyond Language1:45

1-5 Plan for this course8:02

1-6 Toward a Bilingual Metaphor4:28

Meet the Instructors

Arturo E. Hernandez
Professor
Psychology

[SOUND] The case of Arturo is interesting, right?

We can surmise from this discussion of the case,

which was published in 1886 in an Italian journal.

That, he was a native speaker of Italian, and

that he learned French and English later in life.

And interestingly this brings up a debate, right?

So is it the case that the earlier learned language is more resistant to damage?

Or is it the case that maybe the more familiar language is resistant to damage?

Now in the case of this patient, right?

Italian was his earlier learned language, and

it was also his most familiar language.

And these two factors have been considered, and

were considered in neuro psychological literature.

They're still considered today, but

they were considered originally in the neuro psychological literature,

the idea of familiarity by, Pitres was brought up.

Now Pitres trained as a doctor, right?

I n France in Bordeaux.

And he later went on to look at several patients that also

had some types of impairment.

His idea was that the language that would be most resistant to damage would be

the language that the patient was speaking at the time of the stroke.

Petri's considered a series of cases, so he considered cases of people who for

example, one gentlemen who knew German as a native language.

And then learned several languages later in life.

At 50, 60 years of age he had a stroke and what he found was that this patient was

actually better able to speak the languages that he was speaking at the time

of insult, than the one that he learned, as a child.

Suggesting that there was something about what language was being used at

the time of stroke that might actually benefit that, that language and

allow it be used, after the incident.

Now ,you might be asking well the hold on, how can it be that

it's the most recent one, wouldn't that be nece, maybe that's not the best language?

And of course we can talk more about that as the course goes on.

Whether there's a dissociation between when you learn a language and

how well you speak it.

But in the case of Petri, he's arguing that how well you speak it plays a role.

And that's still true today

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