Sunday, January 14, 2007

This is my first academic entry

This made me really happy to read:
Regarding fMRI's: "It is assumed that the BOLD (blood oxygenation level dependent) response indirectly reflects neural activity. Although these methods represent major advances for the field of cognitive neuroscience, they are not without complications as tools for studying real-time language comprehension. First, the hemodynamic response to an event is delayed several seconds and eveloves over 10-15 s. Thus speakers produce (on average) three words, four syllables, and 12 phonemes per sec. Furthermore, the processing of asingle linguistic unit, for example, a word, most liekly involves a constellation of processes, each having temporal durations of considerably less than 1s [the time it takes for an fMRI to read neural activity in a human brain]" Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Kim, A, et al. 2004 Sentences in the Brain: Event-Related Potentials as Real-Time Reflections of Sentence Comprehension and Language Learning in: Carreiras, M., and Clifton, C [eds.] The On-Line Study of Sentence Comprehension

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