Language
In human beings, it is the left hemisphere that usually contains the specialized language areas. While this holds true for 97% of right-handed people, about 19% of left-handed people have their language areas in the right hemisphere and as many as 68% of them have some language abilities in both the left and the right hemisphere. The two hemispheres are thought to contribute to the processing and understanding of language: the left hemisphere processes the linguistic meaning of prosody (or, the rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech), while the right hemisphere processes the emotions conveyed by prosody. Studies of children have shown that if a child has damage to the left hemisphere, the child may develop language in the right hemisphere instead. The younger the child, the better the recovery. So, although the "natural" tendency is for language to develop on the left, human brains are capable of adapting to difficult circumstances, if the damage occurs early enough.
The first language area within the left hemisphere to be discovered is Broca's area, named after Paul Broca, who discovered the area while studying patients with aphasia, a language disorder. Broca's area doesn't just handle getting language out in a motor sense, though. It seems to be more generally involved in the ability to process grammar itself, at least the more complex aspects of grammar. For example, it handles distinguishing a sentence in passive form from a simpler subject-verb-object sentence — the difference between "The girl was hit by the boy" and "The boy hit the girl."
The second language area to be discovered is called Wernicke's area, after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist who discovered the area while studying patients who had similar symptoms to Broca's area patients but damage to a different part of their brain. Receptive aphasia (also known as Wernicke's aphasia) is the term for the disorder occurring upon damage to a patient's Wernicke's area.
Receptive aphasia does not only affect speech comprehension. People with receptive aphasia also have difficulty recalling the names of objects, often responding with words that sound similar, or the names of related things, as if they are having a hard time recalling word associations.
Read more about this topic: Human Brain
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)