broca's area is the area of the brain that controls language comprehension.
broca’s area is the area of the brain that controls?
language comprehension
neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain damage. aphasiology attempts to correlate structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on language processing. one of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was paul broca, 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. phrenologists had made the claim in the early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions and that language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain, but broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship, and has been described as "epoch-making" and "pivotal" to the fields of neurolinguistics and cognitive science. later, carl wernicke, after whom wernicke's area is named, proposed that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks, with broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and wernicke's area handling auditory speech comprehension. the work of broca and wernicke established the field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied through examining physical characteristics of the brain. early work in aphasiology also benefited from the early twentieth-century work of korbinian brodmann, who "mapped" the surface of the brain, dividing it up into numbered areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell structure) and function; these areas, known as brodmann areas, are still widely used in neuroscience today.
neurolinguistics
since studies carried out in the late 1970's it has been understood that the relationship between broca's area and broca's aphasia is not as consistent as once thought. lesions to broca's area alone don't result in a broca's aphasia, nor do broca's aphasic patients necessarily have lesions in broca's area. lesions to broca's area alone are known to produce just a transient mutism that resolves inside 3–6 weeks. this discovery suggests that broca's area may be included in some aspect of verbalization or articulation; however, it does not address its part in sentence comprehension. still, broca's area frequently emerges in functional imaging studies of sentence processing. however, it also becomes activated in word-level tasks. this suggests that broca’s area is not dedicated to sentence processing but supports a function common to both. in fact, broca's area can show activation in such non-linguistic tasks as imagery of motion.
broca's area