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Despite this caveat, a consensus seems to be forming that whatever role Broca's area may play, it may relate to known working memory functions of the frontal areas. (There is a wide distribution of Talairach coordinates [39] reported in the functional imaging literature that are referred to as part of Broca's area.) The processing of a passive ...
Broca's area was first suggested to play a role in speech function by the French neurologist and anthropologist Paul Broca in 1861. The basis for this discovery was the analysis of speech problems resulting from injuries to this brain region, located in the inferior frontal gyrus.
The model is known as the Wernicke–Geschwind model. For listening to and understanding spoken words, the sounds of the words are sent through the auditory pathways to area 41, which is the primary auditory cortex (Heschl's gyrus). From there, they continue to Wernicke's area, where the meaning of the words is extracted.
Most language processing takes place in Broca's area usually in the left hemisphere. [9] Damage to this region often results in a type of non-fluent aphasia known as Broca's aphasia. Broca's area is made up of the pars opercularis and the pars triangularis, both of which contribute to verbal fluency, but each has its own specific contribution.
The arcuate fasciculus is a white matter pathway in the brain which contains two branches: a ventral branch connecting Wernicke's area with Broca's area and a dorsal branch connecting the posterior temporal region with the middle frontal gyrus. This dorsal branch appears to be particularly important for phonological working memory processes. [183]
The brain structures of chimpanzees are very similar to those of humans. Both contain Broca's and Wernicke's homologues that are involved in communication. Broca's area is largely used for planning and producing vocalizations in both chimpanzees and humans.
One of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, [2] a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area.
Speech production is the process by which a thought in the brain is converted into an understandable auditory form. [4] [5] [6] This is a multistage mechanism that involves many different areas of the brain. The first stage is planning, where the brain constructs words and sentences that turn the thought into an understandable form. [4]