New Research on the Brain and Language

Today I ran across an article about new research that focuses on how the brain interprets grammar and inflection in language differently. Since I have not thoroughly studied the brain, I don't really have an argument on whether or not this research is correctly interpreted. However, it seems like the research is pretty clear. Basically the researchers studied the different regions of the brain that were activated when the meaning of a sentence can be understood from the grammatical structure in contrast to when it must be inferred from inflection in the sentence. What they found was that although there are similar regions activated by the two different forms of communication, they produced different patterns of brain activity. The article suggests that this is one of the most distinct reasons humans are able to communicate in a more complex form than animals is due to stronger connections between the different areas of the brain that allow us to interpret the complexities of language. 

To give a better sense of how this study was preformed the article shared some interesting tidbits about how different languages assign the subject, direct object, and indirect object. In English word order is extremely important in assigning these placements to each noun. The subject comes before the verb, the direct object comes after it and the indirect object comes after distinguishing words like to, for or at. However, other languages distinguish the different roles of nouns not through placement but with suffixes or inflection. I'm personally most familiar with Ancient Greek which declines all the nouns. Greek has five declensions. The nominate case takes the role of the subject. The accusative is the direct object and the dative is the indirect object. There are also the vocative and genitive forms that have other meanings. Unlike in English, because Greek attaches specific suffixes to each noun a specific order is not necessary to understand the phrase. Consequently many different forms of sentence structure are commonly used in Greek. Similarly other languages use inflection to give a specific meaning to each noun.

Upon reading this article my first question was how did they actually study this, because it seems like each language exclusively uses one form or the other. However, the original article points out that in Sign Language both grammatical structures are used interchangeably. This study was a success because the researchers used native signers in order to avoid dealing with the complication of testing speakers of different languages. Had no language existed that used a combination of the two structures the researchers would have had to address the uncertainty of whether these differences were associated with the grammatical structures or the languages themselves. Choosing to use only signers really made this an effective study and provided an interesting insight on how the brain interprets language. My only question is, do other languages exist that use both these grammatical structures as well? I feel like to a small extent English uses inflection for emphasis. So is it present in a minimal form in many languages?