Theme for 2010: The Neuroscience of Language

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The topic of this year's AI course is 'the neuroscience of language'. The question we will be investigating is: How is language implemented in the human brain? Answering this question involves interdisciplinary research in several different areas of cognitive science, including linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and computer science. The course is designed to be accessible to students from any of these areas.

The course focusses on the question of how language interfaces with the sensorimotor system. What are the mechanisms which allow us to talk about the things we see and do? As a concrete way of approaching this question, we will focus on a single example episode, in which a man grabs a cup.

There are three parts to the course. We begin in Part I by studying the neural mechanisms involved in perceiving (or performing) a reach-to-grasp action. This will draw on recent experimental work in sensorimotor neuroscience and psychology. In Part II we will study the syntactic structure of a simple transitive sentence which reports such an action (e.g. the English sentence 'The man grabbed a cup'). This will involve an introduction to a recent model of syntax developed by Noam Chomsky and colleagues, called Minimalism. In Part III, we will explore the neural mechanisms which are involved in converting a 'sensorimotor' representation of the episode into a linguistic one. This will involve a survey of work in developmental and neural models of language.

The textbook for the course is a book I have just written called 'Sensorimotor cognition and natural language syntax'. It's currently available online from my publications page.