“if a sequencing area is at the root of human language, we might be able to boost our language abilities by practicing other sequential activities, such as music, dancing, imagining multipart objects, and step-by-step logical reasoning” A User’s Guide to the Brain, pg 272

“Eight-month-old babies can… detect clear patterns in the sounds of language after hearing only a two-minute sample of connected speech” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 263

“The process [of language learning] actually starts before birth when neural connections are made from the speech a fetus hears while in the womb… enough auditory information is taken in that newborns prefer listening to speech in their own language: four-day-old Russian babies will suck harder when they hear Russian than when they hear Portuguese” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 264

“After only crying and grunting for the first two months of life, babies begin to coo and laugh in the third month, as the larynx descends in the throat, opening the cavity behind the tongue and giving it the forward and backward movements needed for the production of vowel sounds” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 265

“Deaf children with signing parents “babble” with their hands “in the same way and on the same schedule as hearing children” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 266

“In all languages… children have trouble forming past-tense verbs or plural nouns at about the same age” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 266

“Researchers have pinpointed sites in the cortex that control aspects of language as narrow as the naming of living things, gemstones, or fabrics” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 267

A test for the lateralization of the neurology of language that anyone can perform:

“Try to repeat a passage of poetry while you simultaneously tap a finger on a table. It is significantly more difficult to tap a finger on your right hand than your left, because the movement of the right finger is controlled by the left hemisphere and competes for neurons with the language areas there” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 274

“After a right-hemisphere stroke, patients can still communicate quite well, but they… can only interpret language literally” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 275

“some stroke victims can read normally except for specific words, such as adjectives, nouns, verbs, or abstract words, while others lose only the ability to write” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 280

“people can lose the ability to use one [Japanese] script and not the other; the two systems seem to be based in different brain regions” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 281

“hydrocephalus and William’s syndrome result in extremely altered brains and low IQs, which makes daily functioning difficult. Remarkably, these individuals can converse fluently. They have intact and even above-average grammar and language comprehension and production, but are often referred to as ‘cocktail party conversationalists’ because of the lack of deep meaning behind smooth speech” A User’s Guide to the Brain pg 286