Readings
The textbook for this course is Language and the Brain: A slim guide to neurolinguistics by Jon Brennan. You can purchase it through the bookstore.
PDFs of the articles below are available for download here. Articles that are assigned as reading are also linked on the schedule.
Course Bibliography
The references that are highlighted are required reading. The others won’t be assigned as reading, but we will discuss evidence and/or ideas from them in class.
Binder, J. R., Frost, J. A., Hammeke, T. A., Cox, R. W., Rao, S. M., & Prieto, T. (1997). Human brain language areas identified by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Journal of Neuroscience, 17(1), 353–362.
Brennan, J. R. (2022). Language and the brain: A slim guide to neurolinguistics. Oxford University Press.
Costa, A., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2014). How does the bilingual experience sculpt the brain? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(5), 336–345.
Ding, N., Melloni, L., Zhang, H., Tian, X., & Poeppel, D. (2016). Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech. Nature Neuroscience, 19(1), 158–164.
Dronkers, N., & Baldo, J. V. (2009). Language: Aphasia. In L. Squire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (pp. 343–348). Academic Press.
Embick, D., & Poeppel, D. (2014). Towards a computational(ist) neurobiology of language: correlational, integrated and explanatory neurolinguistics. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(4), 357–366.
Ferjan Ramirez, N., Leonard, M. K., Torres, C., Hatrak, M., Halgren, E., & Mayberry, R. I. (2014). Neural language processing in adolescent first-language learners. Cerebral Cortex, 24(10), 2772–2783.
Geschwind, N. (1970). The organization of language and the brain. Science, 170(3961), 940–944.
Getz, H., Ding, N., Newport, E. L., & Poeppel, D. (2018). Cortical tracking of constituent structure in language acquisition. Cognition, 181, 135–140.
Hickok, G., Bellugi, U., & Klima, E. S. (1998). The neural organization of language: evidence from sign language aphasia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(4), 129–136.
McCabe, D. P., & Castel, A. D. (2008). Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343–352.
Mesgarani, N., Cheung, C., Johnson, K., & Chang, E. F. (2014). Phonetic feature encoding in human superior temporal gyrus. Science, 343(6174), 1006–1010.
Möttönen, R., & Watkins, K. E. (2009). Motor representations of articulators contribute to categorical perception of speech sounds. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(31), 9819–9825.
Nelson, M. J., El Karoui, I., Giber, K., Yang, X., Cohen, L., Koopman, H., Cash, S. S., Naccache, L., Hale, J. T., Pallier, C., & Dehaene, S. (2017). Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(18), E3669–E3678.
Newport, E. L., & Getz, H. R. (2025). Language acquisition and the human brain (Vol. 2). In J. Binder (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Elsevier.
Newport, E. L., Seydell-Greenwald, A., Landau, B., Turkeltaub, P. E., Chambers, C. E., Martin, K. C., Rennert, R., Giannetti, M., Dromerick, A. W., Ichord, R. N., Carpenter, J. L., Berl, M. M., & Gaillard, W. D. (2022). Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(42), e2207293119.
Newport, E. L., & Supalla, T. (1999). Sign Languages. The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences.
Pallier, C., Devauchelle, A.-D., & Dehaene, S. (2011). Cortical representation of the constituent structure of sentences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(6), 2522–2527.
Petitto, L. A., Zatorre, R. J., Gauna, K., Nikelski, E. J., Dostie, D., & Evans, A. C. (2000). Speech-like cerebral activity in profoundly deaf people processing signed languages: implications for the neural basis of human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(25), 13961–13966.
Zatorre, R. J., Evans, A. C., Meyer, E., & Gjedde, A. (1992). Lateralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing. Science, 256(5058), 846–849.