THE BRAIN AS A LANGUAGE ORGAN: A FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY OF LANGUAGE

THE BRAIN AS A LANGUAGE ORGAN: A FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY OF LANGUAGE

Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) 2025 No. 6
10 September | Wednesday | 2:30 PM
CSSP Health and Wellness Center

The Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) features talks by invited experts on various topics under the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics. For this sixth installment, visiting research fellow Aaron Santa Maria, PhD Fellow at Ghent University, will give a talk on the brain as a language organ.

ABSTRACT
How does the brain make language possible? This talk will explore the fascinating ways our brains allow us to speak, understand, read, and write. For a long time, linguists thought that language lived mainly in two specific brain areas. Today, research paints a much more complex picture: language depends on a wide network of regions that work together, from the frontal and temporal lobes to deeper brain structures. We’ll look at how these areas connect to form pathways for understanding meaning and producing speech, and how both sides of the brain play important but different roles—for example, one side helping with grammar, the other with tone and emotion. Along the way, we’ll revisit key discoveries, highlight new brain imaging insights, and show how the brain truly functions as an organ of language and a system designed for human communication.

BIONOTE
Aaron Santa María obtained his European Joint Master’s Degree in Clinical Linguistics from the University of Groningen, Ghent University, and the University of Eastern Finland in 2024, specializing in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and clinical linguistics. He conducted his research internship at the Center for Language, Brain and Learning at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in the Heritage Language Acquisition project with Dr. Brechje van Osch, and continues to collaborate with the same center as an affiliate researcher. In 2020, he graduated with a degree in European Languages (Spanish and French) from the University of the Philippines Diliman.

In 2024, Aaron received an PhD fellowship grant from the Flemish Research Foundation for his project ‘Towards an integrative account of English-Tagalog intra-word code-switching’ at Ghent University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Renata Enghels (Ghent University), Prof. Dr. Robert Hartsuiker (Ghent University), and Dr. María del Carmen Parafita Couto (Leiden University). In his PhD project at Ghent University, he is studying the intra-word code-switching structures as spoken by various speech communities in the Philippines and their underlying linguistic processes using innovative approaches from corpus linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics.

His research interests also include phonological development, morphosyntax, and language processing.

In addition to his research experience, Aaron has had several stints as an educator. From 2020 to 2022, he worked for the Spanish Ministry of Education as a bilingual language assistant in the public education sector in Madrid. Concurrently, he also worked as a lecturer of Spanish at the University of the Philippines.

This face-to-face event is free and open to the public.

Source: UP Department of Linguistics Facebook