[music] Greetings, dear students! My name is Tatiana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya, and I am a professor at the Saint-Petersburg State University. I specialize in neurolinguistics, which is precisely the topic of this course. Neurolinguistics is a science that aims to discover what exactly occurs in the human brain when we speak, listen to speech, perceive complex stimuli and, in general, engage in complex mental activity that is characteristic of our species. This is a cutting-edge, multidisciplinary field of study. It is developed by linguists, psychologists, physiologists and even specialists in artificial intelligence, and philosophers. Of course, we do not have enough time to cover all aspects of this fascinating field of science in the space of this course, but you’ll have an opportunity to see, hear and even study a relatively wide range of its topics. This course will be presented by people from different countries who are professionals in their areas. Let me introduce you to some of them. We’ve invited several guest speakers. You’ll hear Turid Helland from the University of Bergen in Norway. She specializes in dyslexia, has published several books and is very well-known among our European colleagues. You will also see Kenneth Hugdal, a professor from the University of Bergen, who has for many years headed the laboratory that focuses on mapping brain functions during different kinds of mental activity. Among other topics, he specializes in studying brain activity in schizophrenic patients, for example, when they experience auditory hallucinations. This is a very interesting topic because it answers, or, at least, attempts to answer, the question of what happens in the brain when it deals with events that are not real, events that the brain has invented completely by itself. Kirill Nourski, a medical doctor and a professor of the Neurosurgery department in the University of Iowa. His main focus is neuroimaging, especially of the brain area that processes auditory information and speech. Professor Kira Gor specializes in second language acquisition. This is the area of science that focuses on what happens in the human when he or she studies not their first language (as does every child on Earth) but their second or third language, and so on. She is a professor in the University of Maryland, USA, and she is going to teach you about the organization of the mental lexicon, that is to say, how language is organized in the brain. She will also tell you about phonology and morphology. Ekaterina Protasova is a professor in the University of Helsinki, and her main focus is studying monolingual and bilingual children, that is, children who only speak one language and children who speak two or more languages. Apart from the guest speakers that I have just introduced to you, this course will also be presented by our Russian colleagues. I am, of course, one of them. There is also our colleague, a young DSc and professor, Maxim Kireev from the Institute of Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is head of the Neuroimaging laboratory, that is, he focuses on the topics that can be studied using state-of-the-art techniques such as Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), Positron-emission tomography (PET) and other experimental techniques, for instance, EEG. Natalia Slioussar is a DSc. She studies how the mental lexicon is organized in the human brain, but, in this particular course, she will discuss examples of neurolinguistic experiments. She will tell you how such experiments are planned and how they are carried out. It is actually a very demanding task, because, to plan such an experiment, you need, I would say, ten times as much time as you need to conduct it. Tatiana Petrova is an associate professor at Saint-Petersburg State University, and the topic that she will tell you about is Alexander Luria’s approach to neurolinguistics. He is a Russian classic in this field, and the author of the first book on neurolinguistics “An Introduction to Neurolinguistics”. One point of Alexander Luria’s interest was aphasia, which is a term for speech deficits that arise from various types of brain injuries. Veronika Prokopenya, an associate professor at Saint-Petersburg State University, will also join our discussion of aphasia: she will talk about different methods that help assess the patients who suffered from such tragic loss, or disintegration, of speech. So, what are we going to discuss? The brain is the most complex thing that we know of, and the human brain has a special capacity – the language capacity. No other species on our planet has this capacity, not even the most highly developed of our animal cousins: elephants, dolphins, primates; not even ravens, not even parrots. Although these species do have some human-like capabilities, not one of them has the special trait that characterizes the Homo Sapiens, or, I would even say, Homo Loquens, which means “the speaking human”, or, since more recent times, Homo Scribens que, that is, “the literate human”. Our course is organized in a way that will help you learn about almost the whole range of the topics studied in neurolinguistics. We will discuss first (native) language acquisition in children, talk about difficulties that face the children whose language development is different from that of the majority. We will discuss speech impairments of different origin, from aphasia to schizophrenia and other problems that can, unfortunately, happen to people. We will also discuss the methods we use to study all these phenomena, and we will try to teach you about all this in a way that, on the one hand, is easy to understand, and, on the other hand, takes into account the cutting-edge view on these problems shared by specialists all over the world, from different countries. This is a very advanced field, and it is interesting not only for professional scientists, but also... I think it will also fascinate those who aren’t professional scientists, but want to know how come that we humans are able to do all those insanely complex things associated with speech and cognition. I hope that you enjoy exploring the topics of our course. I think we have managed to make it vivid, interesting and easy to understand. I wish you all good luck!