Language

Motor Regions

primary motor cortex: motor neurons control muscles involved in speech production
- jaw
- lips
- tongue
- vocal cords
basal ganglia: facilitates automatic sequences of behaviors needed for speech

Perception

Broca’s Area

involved in language production
location: left frontal lobe
function: language production
- prosody: rhythmic emphatic melodic aspects oof speech
- word choice
- grammar
- articulation
broca’s aphasia: difficulty producing language especially speech
neural mechanism:
- motor memories about sequences of muscular movements needed for speech
- motor neurons control motor cortex outputs to the mouth tongue etc

Wernicke’s Area

involved in meaningful language production and comprehension
location: superior left temporal gyrus near the auditory cortex
wenicke’s aphasia: difficulty comprehending or producing logical language
Neural mechanism: contains memories of sequences of sounds that constitute words
comprises the dictionary of the brain along with the posterior language area
posterior language area: regions surrounding wernickes area
- integrates the sensations and memories to form definitions or meanings of words

Lateralization

left hemisphere: dominant for speech and language production in 90% of people
- wernickes and brocas area in the left hemisphere
right hemisphere:
- language abour spatial relationships
- abstract language compression
- prosody: rhythmic emphatic melodic aspects of speech
- the man walked to the grocery store
split brain operation: surgical severing of the corpus collosum isolating the left and right hemispheres
- most abilities remain
showinf image to one visual field allows scientists to derermine the roles of the oopposite hemisphere
- show apple to left
- right recieves
- cannot name but can draw stimulus w left hand

difficulty producinglanguage especially speech
- slow labored articulation the lacks prosody
3 deficits
- agrammatism: difficulty using grammatical constructions
- Difficulty using function words (i.e. a, the, about) →speech mainly composed of content words (i.e. nouns, verbs)
- Grammatical markers (-ed)
- Comprehending grammatical aspects of language produced by others
- anomia: word finding difficulty
- articulation difficulties: impaired pronunciation

difficulty comprehending language and producing meaningful speech
- Little distress or awareness of own aphasia
- Speech is meaningless & illogical
- Few content words, and those that are used to not makes sense
- Impaired comprehension of others’ speech
patients cannot correctly name common objects
3 major deficits
- spoken word recognition: WA symptomology consist of some components of pure word deafness
- pure word deafness: left damage to temporal. lobe impairs analysis of sounds of words
  - Auditory perception of timing of complex sounds to produce speech
  - Can speak but may “forget” pronunciation over time
- language comprehension: requires linguistic information from memory
- WA symptomology consists of some components of transcortical sensory aphasia
- Transcortical sensory aphasia: Damage to auditory regions surrounding Wernicke’s area (posterior language area)
  - Word repetition intact, but cannot comprehend meaning of others’ or own speech
- converting thoughts into words:
- WA symptomology consists of some components of anomic aphasia
- Anomic aphasia: partial amnesia for words →difficulty finding the appropriate words
- Patients with anomic aphasia can comprehend other’s speech
  - those with WA cant \n

Arcuate Fasciculus: bundle of axons connecting Wernicke’s and Broca’s area, conveys speech sounds from auditory cortex to frontal lobe
Conduction Aphasia: damage to arcuate fasciculus
- Symptoms: fluent & meaningful speech, \n but poor repetition of non-words
Evidence for two pathways

1. Auditory information 2. Function: repetition

1. Information about meaning 2. Function: comprehension