Do Studies Of Neurological Disorders Support The Claim That Specific Language Functions Are Associated With Distinct Neural Structures?

In 1848, Phineas Gage was a 25 year old working man. An accident occurred to him at work one day which radically changed how the brain was viewed and known to function. He was helping to prepare the way for railroads to be put down when an explosion happened unexpectedly and it sent a 43 inch tamping iron into Phineas Gage’s head through his face, skull and brain. The tamping iron went all the way through and landed some ways off. The remarkable thing was that Gage became conscious within a matter of a few minutes after the incident. Not only did he wake up but he still had the ability to walk and to talk. Even though Gage survived his injuries he was no longer the same.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast Broca’s and Wernickie’s area of the brain. The approach to identifying parts of the brain that involved language started in 1861 when the brain of a not long ago patient who had an unusual disorder passed away, by a French neurosurgeon, named Paul Broca. (Dubuc 2002) The patient whose name became known as “Tan” was the result of that being the only sound he could make, the syllable tan.

One of the primary notions for this decision to be made was established based on the relative location of not just Wernicke’s area itself, but the other regions associated therein. Removing or damaging Wernicke’s area would more than likely lead to an inability for me to understand both written and verbal forms of communication. Although I may still be able to formulate sentences, I would not be able to correctly and effectively express my thoughts to a sufficient degree. Moreover; Robson, Sage, and Ralph (2012) infer that several patient’s who suffer from lesions or other forms of damage concerning Wernicke’s area are often completely unaware of their current neurological condition. After the estranged neuroscientist has removed this region of my brain, even though I would be unable to formulate coherent sentences, I would still have the ability to understand language so long as the association areas extending from both the parietal, temporal, and frontal regions of my brain remained

In the novel Phineas Gage, A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science by John Fleischman, Chapter 2 “What we thought about how we thought” tells about what doctors in the late 1800s thought about Brain Science. Phineas Gage was a man that lived in the late 1800s he had an accident were a tamping iron went through his cheek through his brain and out of his forehead. Whereas there were two schools of thought about how the brain worked,doctor's knowledge and standards were dangerous also their information about the brain was inaccurate.

For SP patients, strong selective attentional bias was displayed. SP patients took longer to name the ink color of speech related words compared to the control group. However, there was no difference in time for GAD related, neutral, and positive words between SP and control patients. SP patients showed the same pattern as GAD patients: they were slower in naming ink color for speech related words than GAD related, neutral, and positive words. Therefore, the schema congruency hypothesis or specificity was

In FD, neuronal atrophy impinges the anterior, frontal and temporal brain lobes. Language difficulty and varied behaviour are common

Linguistic discourse arises from the multiple areas: from studies of primate social behavior, from the comparison of existing human languages, from research on the development of language in children, from studies of genetic and anatomical structures, from cross-cultural studies, from the observation of earning and forming lexicon, and from the studies of the communication of bees, birds, and mammals (cit). Initially, though, language, spoken or signed, was a gestural system that evolved from so-called “mirror system” in the primate brain. Mirror system is a mechanism that allows to equate self actions with actions of others; mirror system's neurons are part of dorsal visual system (citation). The dorsal pathway projects visual information

Stein, M., Federspiel, A., Koenig, T., Wirth, M., Strik, W., Wiest, R., Brandeis D., & Dierks, T. (2012). Structural plasticity in the language system related to increased second language proficiency. Cortex, 48(4), 458-465.

The idea of epigenesis has become well known as an integral part of the constructivist theory which states that neural activity within the brain is largely spontaneous, driven by genetic and molecular instances (Mareschal, D., Johnson, M.H., & Grayson, A., 2004). However, after birth, the neural activity is influenced by sensory and motor experience and the outside environment (Mareschal et al, 2004). Epigenesis is what the constructivist theory is about, the interaction between genes and the environment. A study done by Petersen et al used PET, or positron emission tomography, to understand the responses of native English adult speakers to written stimuli in the form of English words, pseudowords or words that had no meaning but could

The two hemispheres have their own basic functions that psychiatrists and researchers have concluded by a variety of different tasks performed by children, and brain monitoring technological devices arranged to devise results from. Research has allowed us to understand what happens during brain activity, and what areas in the brain are stimulated. The development of language production and visuospatial memory in the brain has been proved through new technology to exist and are visible, but how and why these two are formed and their origin are not entirely clear. In some studies and cases they “have used direct measures of cerebral lateralization, and have gotten mixed results” (Groen, Whitehouse, Badcock, & Bishop 2012). Understanding why there are differences in the effect of language production and visuospatial memory have on lateralization has stirred up some misconceptions. To better our understanding in regards to development of the two hemispheres, further studies can be done to learn more about how language production and visuospatial memory in relation to lateralization occur and advance in the developing

Increased grey matter density and elevated activity in the caudate insinuate advancement in letter fluency task as opposed to the category fluency. Whereas higher densities areas involved in semantic access, most notably the left inferior temporal cortex, resulted in elevated category fluency3.

No matter where you are in the world, you are taught about language. Whether it’s in your home learning your language or in school trying to learn a foreign language. Although while learning language the notion is never really thought about or brought up that the language and way we speak can influence the way we think and interact. Phycologist and neuroscientist alike have spent years, with multiple different tests to see if there is a connection between the various languages that are spoken and the way people not only think but also how they go about their daily lives. She writes to not only her colleagues and neuroscientists but also to anyone in the general public that is genuinely interested in the connection between

The purpose of this paper is to pursue one important and fundamental aim: language and the brain are purely inseparable since it allows us to perform essential tasks such as generating, comprehending and expressing speech. With damage to the brain, individuals can no longer perform such tasks which can ultimately lead to many types of language disorders. The focus of this paper is Broca’s aphasia, a language disorder characterized by the inability to produce written and spoken speech. Damage to the brain can cause many types of speech impairments as well as comprehension deficits.

The current experiment investigated different contexts in which the activity of frontal motor regions (primary motor and premotor cortices) could be associated to the action component of words. Unlike previous studies, we did not dichotomize words into action and non-action categories. Instead, we created 4 levels of action ranging from very low action (level1) to very high action (level4) using behavioral data provided by our fMRI participants, with the intention of taking their experiences with words’ referents into account. Additionally, the creation of several action levels allowed us to evaluate, for the first time, whether the activity of the frontal motor system was linearly connected to the action component of words or not.

Using evidence from at least two disorders of language development consider the extent to which this evidence informs our understanding of how language typically develops.