Discovering Brain Areas Involved in Language Capabilities

For many years, scientists have said that there is no single area of the brain that is directly and solely responsible for our language capabilities. Naturally, some regions are more involved in the process than others, but a new investigation highlights that unexpected parts of the cortex can play an important part in communications as well. The research, authored by scientists at the University of Rochester, in the United States, shows that the several cortical areas involved in language capabilities each fulfill unique primordial tasks. The accurate integration of these tasks dictates the overall result, the team says.

“We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains. Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else,” says Aaron Newman, the expert who conducted the work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester. The scientist, who is also the coauthor of the investigation, is now based at the Dalhousie University.

The science team likens the way the brain functions when making sense of sentences it hears to the way a carpenter completes a task. The worker digs around a larger bag of tools, producing the ones that are necessary for successfully completing the simple tasks that make up the larger, more complex one. The group, which also includes expert Ted Supalla, Elissa Newport, and Daphne Bavelier, both at the university, and colleague Peter Hauser, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, details the findings in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“These results show that people really ought to think of language and the brain in a different way, in terms of how the brain capitalizes on some perhaps preexisting computational structures to interpret language,” Newport explains. She adds that the brain, for example, processes word-order sentences in a different manner from inflectional ones. Different brain areas are involved (the frontal cortex versus the temporal lobe), which evolutionarily have very different roles in the cortex.