Stephen Wilson

University of Arizona

Monday, March 3rd at 2 PM in AP&M 4301. Stephen Wilson (University of Arizona) will be presenting. 

Dual-route models of language: From Wernicke to today

There are numerous cases in which the nervous system processes different aspects of a stimulus in segregated, parallel pathways. For instance, the visual system processes object form in a ventral "what"pathway and spatial information in a dorsal "where/how" pathway. In the domain of language, Carl Wernicke was the first to propose that language processing involves distinct parallel pathways. He suggested that there are two pathways from the sound images of words: one to conceptual representations, and another to articulatory representations. Contemporary research has largely supported the spirit of Wernicke's model. However, recent findings suggest that there are other important ways in which information processing is segregated in the language system. In particular, I will present evidence for the view that lexical and grammatical information are processed by distinct ventral and dorsal pathways respectively.