Achievement

Brain damage can test whether linguists' grammars describe actual knowledge in the brain. Linguistics trainee Ian Coffman, working with neuropsychologist Prof. Brenda Rapp, is showing that brain damage can alter a speaker's English phonological grammar into a new grammar like that found in intact speakers of other languages. #CC words -- words beginning with 2 consonants, like 'stop' and 'blue' -- are not permitted in the post-stroke grammar of patient VBR, who produces 'sstop' and 'belue'. This matches what intact speakers of certain languages banning #CC words produce when they borrow #CC words from other languages which permit them. In those speakers, and in VBR, these pronunciations can be explained by general grammatical principles which predict that the altered words will acoustically match the original words as closely as possible, within the bounds set by the sound combinations allowed by the speaker's grammar.