Language Talent and Brain Activity
Grzegorz Dogil, Susanne Maria Reiterer
This comprehensive project has the objective of describing and assessing pronunciation talent with special focus on its psychological and neural correlates. The first part of this undertaking describes the extensive tests necessary to measure phonetic talent in its various dimensions, such as production and perception, the segmental and suprasegmental levels of speech, and different utterance forms such as spontaneous speech, reading and imitation. Subjects are examined in their native language (German), a familiar second language (English) and, to a lesser degree, an unfamiliar language (Hindi). The project also investigates psychological and behavioral influences such as empathy or motivation on pronunciation performance, as well as correlations with general linguistic aptitude. The described measures and correlations allow a reliable classification of proficiency and talent level to be used in the selection of subjects for the neuroimaging studies in the second part of the project. These use functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to observe differences in brain activity between talented and untalented individuals during the performance of phonetic tasks (perception of phonetic differences, imitation, reading). |
Contents
Talent and proficiency in language
|
1 |
Assessment of phonetic ability
|
17 |
Cognitive aspects of pronunciation talent
|
67 |
Personality and pronunciation talent in second language acquisition
|
97 |
Functional imaging of language competentbrain areas
|
131 |
a synopsis
|
155 |
An incidental speech talent following acquired brain damage?
|
193 |
Musicality and phonetic language aptitude
|
213 |
phonetic convergence as a signature of pronunciation talent
|
257 |
Coarticulatory resistance as a signature of pronunciation talent
|
279 |
intonational variation as a signature of pronunciation talent
|
305 |
Direct brain feedback and language learning from the gifted
|
337 |
a short language biography of Prof Max Mangold
|
351 |
359 | |