In about a third of people who are left-handed, however, speech may actually be controlled by the right side. In recent decades, there has been an explosion of research into language processing in the brain. The formation of speech requires many different processes, from putting thoughts into words, forming a comprehensible sentence, and then actually making the mouth move to make the correct sounds.
Each hemisphere of the cerebrum can also be divided into regions called lobes, which include the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. The lobes located in the front and side of your brain, the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes, are primarily involved in speech formation and understanding. It has an important role in turning your ideas and thoughts into actual spoken words.
The temporal lobe is also the region where sound is processed. It helps you form words, speak clearly, and understand concepts in language form. The cerebellum is located at the back of your brain. The cerebellum is involved in coordinating voluntary muscle movements like opening and closing your mouth, moving your arms and legs, standing upright, and maintaining balance. It also controls language processing. A review published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology suggests that the cerebellum is actually more important to language processing than previously thought.
To speak clearly, you must move the muscles of your mouth, tongue, and throat. This is where the motor cortex comes into play.
Both aphasia and apraxia are most often caused by a stroke or trauma to the brain, usually when the left side of the brain is affected. Other less common causes are brain tumors and infections.
Symptoms of aphasia or apraxia depend on where the damage occurs in the brain and the severity of the damage. These symptoms include:. Speech is often limited to short sentences of less than four words. Another cause is if stroke or injury damages the areas of the brain that control movements of the muscles of the mouth or tongue.
But this crying follows a certain melody. You might think that all babies sound similar when they cry, but when a group of German and French scientists investigated the crying sounds of German and French newborn babies [ 2 ], they actually discovered that they were different! As you can see in Figure 1 , French babies show a cry melody with low intensity at the beginning, which then rises.
German babies, on the other hand, show a cry melody with high intensity at the beginning, which then falls. These findings become even more interesting when you know that these cry melodies resemble the melodies of the two languages when people speak French or German: German is, like English, a language that stresses words at the beginning, while French stresses words toward their endings.
The surprising thing is that the cry melodies of French and German newborn babies follow these speech stress patterns! How can this be? How can babies learn the melodies and sounds of their mother tongue even before they are born? At that time, their ears are developed enough and start working. Consequently, every day of the last few months before birth, the baby can hear people speaking — this is the first step in language learning!
This first step, in other words, is to learn the melody of the language. Later, during the next few months and years after birth, other features of language are added, like the meaning of words or the formation of full sentences.
This can be the development of the hearing system, which allows the baby to hear the sound of language from the womb. But the simultaneous development of the brain is just as important, because it is our brain that provides us with the ability to learn and to develop new skills.
And it is from our brain that speech and language originate. Certain parts of the brain are responsible for understanding words and sentences. These brain areas are mainly located in two regions, in the left side of the brain, and are connected by nerves. Together, these brain regions and their connections form a network that provides the hardware for language in the brain. Figure 2 illustrates this talkative mesh in the brain.
The connections within this network are particularly important, because they allow the network nodes to exchange information. Assuming that the brain develops during infancy and childhood, we might wonder from what age onward the network of language areas is well enough established to serve as a sufficient precondition to speaking and understanding language. Is it that the network is there from a very early age on, and that the development of language is dependent on learning based on the input from the environment?
Or is this network something that develops over time and provides a growing precondition that enables more and more possible language functions? These questions can be answered by investigating the nerve fiber connections in the brain. The nerve fibers are a crucial part of the brain and form the language network. These nerve fibers can be visualized using a technique called magnetic resonance imaging MRI. Instead, the magnetic properties of water yes, water is slightly magnetic are used while the person is inside a strong magnetic field created by the MR scanner.
A physical or innate problem, such as the way the brain works, is often a factor that is overlooked and may be hard to pinpoint. Several areas of the brain must function together in order for a person to develop, utilize and understand language. A problem with any of these areas can cause a language learning, speaking, or reading delay. Your seemingly bored or uninterested student may not be hearing or processing the language like his more successful speaking and reading peers.
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