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Related Concept Videos

Components of Language01:24

Components of Language

Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs. “eh”). Phonemes combine to...
Language and Cognition01:27

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language

Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
Language formation and comprehension take place in the dominant hemisphere. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for understanding the meaning of spoken, written, or sign language, as well as the ability to communicate. For most people, the left hemisphere is the dominant one. The right hemisphere, then, gives tone and emotional context to the...
Language Development01:22

Language Development

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Larynx01:21

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The human larynx, often referred to as the voice box, is an intricate organ located in the neck. It serves as a pathway for air to enter the lungs during respiration and is an essential component of voice production.
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Directional terms are essential for describing the relative locations of different body structures. For instance, an anatomist might describe one band of tissue as "inferior to" another, or a physician might describe a tumor as "superficial to" a deeper body structure. These terms often use comparative terms in pairs to trace out the relative locations of one body part to another or descriptions of body tissues like the deeper ones from superficially present with reference to the body's upright...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 7, 2026

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition
12:49

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

Finding words and rules in a speech stream: functional differences between vowels and consonants.

Juan M Toro1, Marina Nespor, Jacques Mehler

  • 1International School for Advanced Studies, Paris, France.

Psychological Science
|February 15, 2008
PubMed
Summary

This study reveals that speech processing uses consonants for word identification and vowels for grammatical rule extraction. Listeners leverage consonant patterns for words but vowel patterns for syntax, demonstrating distinct processing pathways.

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Published on: July 13, 2019

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fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals
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fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals

Published on: May 23, 2017

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • Previous research proposed consonants primarily signal lexical information and vowels, syntactic information.
  • A prior study demonstrated statistical learning over consonants, not vowels, during word segmentation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the hypothesis that vowels are used for grammatical generalization and consonants are disregarded for this purpose.
  • To investigate the symmetrical roles of consonants and vowels in speech stream processing.

Main Methods:

  • Participants processed artificial speech streams with two tiers: one for word segmentation (transitional probabilities) and another for structural regularity extraction.
  • The study manipulated the salience of consonant and vowel information for both word segmentation and generalization tasks.

Main Results:

  • Participants successfully used consonants for word segmentation.
  • Participants utilized vowel patterns to extract structural generalizations.
  • Attempts to extract generalizations using consonants failed, even when simplified and aided by word segmentation.

Conclusions:

  • Consonants and vowels are differentially utilized for lexical and grammatical processing, respectively.
  • Signal-driven computations in speech processing segregate lexical and grammatical information extraction.