Boggle!

Have you ever played the board game Boggle before? (If not play it here! --> Boggle). Well, the object of the game is to connect and organize letters to make words. You are given a set amount of time to try and find as many of the words as you can. So, I thought, what a better way to break the ice with talking about linguistic plasticity than to talk about a game that involves both.

In Boggle, you have to organize the letters in the ever changing game to make words, but you also have to change the way you look at the game to find new words. This is exactly what the brain does when it comes to language and plasticity. There are numerous ways our brains shift and change when it comes to language. I'll talk about two in this post. The first one deals with the initial learning of language, and the other deals with how our brains change after some type of brain damage.

Noam Chomsky (link to a biography) was a forerunner in the idea that we have some innate predisposition to learn language as soon as we are born. This is the first step to how our brains shift and change to learn language. Humans go through different stages, some might know of the babbling stage (babble babble), then at some point a child will learn the correct way to say something ("Mommy hit the ball"). Then, there is a stage when a child will overlearn some part of the language ("Mommy hitted the ball"). Finally, the child will learn the correct way by being told correctly, or figuring out that "Mommy hitted the ball" is incorrect.

For more on the above go here: language acquisition

The way a child learns a language is due to the reorganizing and plasticity of the brain. Just as we have to change how we look at the Boggle game, a child has to change how they look at language.

At this point you should see that plasticity is a very important and powerful tool that our brain has at its disposal. To show another example of the plasticity of language in the brain we can look at damage to certain areas of the brain. I'll start with a picture of where the language areas are in the brain:




The most common aphasia's that are found to be the most talked about are Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia's. For an overview on Broca's aphasia (a really good one at that) I am going to revert you to Stacy Gioia's blog, (a fellow CogSci student herself!) which deals with case studies in Cognitive Science.

The main idea behind how plasticity and language occur in the brain is that other areas in the brain can take over some of the responsibilities that the damaged area had to do. It's shown that language is not only on the left side of our brains, but in some people it can be on both sides. So, the brain could reorganize on both sides of the brain after damage. To better explain this in I will give some links of interest on the topic.

Here are some articles on this very topic, that if you have time I would recommend reading. Reason being is, it's a lot more complex than a simple overview I can give you here. But, it's still fun to learn about.

Plasticity of Language
Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity
Key to Harnessing Brain Plasticity

Also, if you are interested in neural networks, find me and we can discuss my small attempt at showing how an artificial neural network could recover from some type of damage.

For next time, I will discuss emerging areas in plasticity. Especially how it can relate to more than just the brain.

-Bryan