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Gary Libben is a Canadian psycholinguist and neurolinguist. Libben is the current Department Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics at Brock University in Ontario. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the founding director and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics and former President of the Canadian Linguistics Association.

Education

 * BA, Cum Laude: Psychology, Concordia University, 1976
 * MA: Applied Linguistics, Concordia University, 1982
 * PhD: Linguistics, McGill University, 1986

Work in Linguistics
The basis of Libben's work lies in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Libben's study of language focuses on word processing and word representation in a human's mind and brain. He argues that the properties of words have a psychological meaning linked to the mind. He argues that words are a part of a human's memory and that we interpret new words from “memory association” and “associative links”. But he also maintains that humans can interpret words using their computational (problem-solving) side that is separate from their memory.

= Words and Mind =

Language Processing
Libben’s 2011 chapter on "Psycholinguistics: The Study of Language Processing” focuses on how humans use word, sentence and discourse meaning in their minds through language processing in the brain to communicate. To collect research for this study, language users should have no knowledge that they are currently language processing because it is a subconscious act. He argues that if the process is done unknowingly from the conscious mind, “the language processing system is maximising its ability to operate with speed and efficiency”

He gives an example of how to sense that language processing is subconscious:
 * Libben argues that by giving a participant of research, an extract to read and noticing their eye movement, you can see them language processing. He is implying that the common conception that the participant's eyes move "smoothly from left to right" is wrong, that human's eyes "saccade" and that the participant is not aware of it.

Libben also argues that another example of language processing is how "words are organised in our minds" to give us the skill of communication. He argues that humans rely on "mental lexicon" to adapt to learning new words and collecting them quickly. He maintains that humans collect words during language processing, on the foundation of sound, spelling and meaning. .

Libben insists that gaining data about lexical and language processing requires experimentation. Accordingly, he argues that the lexical decision task and the Priming (psychology) are experiments that measure the response time of both processing. He explains that during the lexical decision task, a participant is shown words on a computer and gathers whether it is an “existing word of the language.” And argues that the experiment helps measure the speed of the participant “lexical access” to their mental lexicon.

Libben states that in a priming paradigm experiment, the participant is shown a word after another word on a computer. The purpose is to see the response time for the related word answers. To explain this, Libben uses the words ("cat-dog"). He claims that when a participant looks at the word cat then dog on screen, the words' mental representation triggers subconsciously in their mind. The mental representation of a cat and dog is a pet. He argues that this trigger allows their mind to connect the target (cat) to its “semantic related prime” (dog), meaning that the words are related. Reasoning that the response time is quicker when the target comes before the "semantic related prime". This is known as the "priming effect."

Lexical Processing
Libben argues that once language processing of a word is done, humans can interpret similar words by making correlations using semantic patterns and morphological patterns. Lexical processing comes from human's ability to make relations between existing words and new words of their knowledge to interpret its meaning. Libben bases his study of lexical processing on "multi- morphemic words": made up of meaningful morphemes. He argues that they can be stored in a mind’s mental lexicon and computed. To explain this he uses the multi-morphemic word "going", implying that the word can be stored in mind wholely during processing, or computed from the word’s “constituent morphemes "go and -ing” and its separate meaning. Libben argues that computation can only be done to regular verbs like going. But irregular verbs such as "went" can only be stored in a human mind because of its lack of affixation.

Compound Processing
Libben argues that compound processing is the concept of “maximization of opportunity.” He argues that the representation of compound words should occur in a human's mental dictionary with morphological patterns and associative links to other words from their mental lexicon. The study of compounds allows linguists to access the “fundamental characteristics of morphology in language.” Libben maintains the idea, that humans are capable of separating compound words into their separate morphemes or computing its meaning with links to their mental dictionary and implies that without this ability newly created compound words would be difficult to interpret.

Libben argues that compounds can be processed through mental lexicon and computation in human's mind through constituent morphemes. To explain this, he claims that the meaning of "houseboat" can be understood because of the mind's mental dictionary or understood through the computation of the separated morphemes "(house - boat)." Libben also reasoned that boat being a “morphological head” should be taken into account because the word "houseboat" can be interpreted as a type of a house, depending on a non-English speakers’ structure of word meaning or because the two constituent morphemes are nouns. Libben argues that some compound words contain constituent morphemes that have an anticipated meaning such as "blueberry." But mentions that this does not apply to all -berry compound words, "elder" does not provide "elderberry" with its meaning when broken down into constituent morphemes. This means that not all lexical compound words are "semantically transparent."

During his linguistic study, Libben discovers that if the mind only “maximizes storage efficiency", the human mind can only select lexical words to form compounds from its mental dictionary with “full decomposition.” He argues that this would make it unnecessary to separate compounds to morphemes. Overall, his research argues that the mind needs to make links using its mental dictionary and break down compounds to morphemes when processing words. This is the meaning of "maximization of opportunities."

= Words and Brain = The basis of Libben's work on neurolinguistics focuses on the representation and processing of language in a human brain. Libben explains how linguists can investigate the brain. He argues that there are techniques that would be useful in their neurolinguistics investigation. He acknowledges that autopsy studies have contributed to the understanding of the brain. And that by linguists looking at CT and PET scans, they can obtain information about the relationship between language and the brain. He suggests experiments such as "Dichotic listening test" and "split-brain studies", so that linguists can gain insight into language processing in the brain.

To explain the study of language and brain, Libben highlights parts of the brain, e.g. "cerebral cortex", "cerebral hemispheres" and "lobes of the brain." Libben argues that the " Broca area" has main control over speech production, "Wernicke's area" has main control over an human having the ability to understand language and the area surrounding the "angular gyrus" contributes to the function of reading language. By Libben highlighting parts of brain and focusing on the specific roles in its function, linguists can start to understand the relationship between language and the brain.

In an attempt to understand language representation and processing in the brain, Libben structures his investigation on studying patients with "aphasia"- "language deficit due to brain damage." He argues that linguists should refer to aphasia as theory, focusing on the condition in terms of "loss of semantic features and phonological rules."

Libben labelled phonological features as a device to identify language representation and processing in the brain. He bases his argument on observations of "phonetic paraphasias of Broca's aphasics". Individuals with Broca's aphasia have limited ability to produce spoken language, the way they express themselves phonetically differs from what they intend to say. An example from a patient:


 * '''1a) It's hard to eat with a spoon
 * '''1b) ...har eat ...wIt...pun

In (1b), Libben argues that the change of phonemes compared to (1a) signifies the patients difficultly to produce certain phonemes. In this example, with differs from /wIt/ and shows the difference in one specific phoneme/feature. He argues that this can be identified as a phonetic rule associated with the condition. This observation made him argue that linguists looking at phonological features was the right device in describing how language is represented and produced. It shows how a less than fully functioning brain has difficulty processing language, highlighting the organ's importance in communication.

In terms of loss of semantic features, Libben argues that the study of aphasia and "deep dyslexia" can bring attention to the “nature of semantic representation” of language in the brain. He argues that the "word mother is likely to be read as father" for a deep dyslexia patient because they say words “systematically related” to the intended read word. He reasons that in this case both words also have a “semantic relation.” The patient's brain can read mother but see father because both words represent a particular sex being a parent to a child. Libben argues that patients with aphasia like patients with deep dyslexia have difficulty processing particular words.

=References=

=External Links=
 * Gary Libben
 * Words in the World
 * The LRC Speaker Series presents, Gary Libben
 * Gary Libben, Ph.D

=Bibliography=
 * O'Grady, W.D., Archibald, J. & Katamba, F. 2011, Contemporary linguistics: an introduction, 2nd, [U.K.] edn, Pearson Education, Harlow.
 * Libben, G. 2008, "Words, mind, and brain" in: Sterkenburg, P. G. J. van (2008) Unity and Diversity of Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co (Retrieved:29/02/2020)
 * Libben, G. 2014, "The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective", Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 31, no. 1-2, pp. 8-25.(Retrieved:23/02/2020)
 * Libben, G. & Jarema, G. 2006;2007;2010;2005;, The representation and processing of compound words, Oxford University Press, Oxford. (Retrieved:23/02/2020)
 * Davis, C.P., Libben, G. & Segalowitz, S.J. 2019, "Compounding matters: Event-related potential evidence for early semantic access to compound words", Cognition, vol. 184, pp. 44-52. (Retrieved:23/02/2020)

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