Talk:Broca's area

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[edit] Is

Is this the same thing as the motor speech area? If so, we should probably include it, simply because eponyms are no longer in vogue. --Mauvila 11:47, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with that term, but some quick googling implies they might be the same. On the other hand, 'motor speech area' is a misleading term, because Broca's area doesn't have much to do with motor control. Masily box 14:50, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

"Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... (his own name), and Dad.... er... hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o'clock... and oh... Thursday... ten o'clock, ah doctors... two... an' doctors... and er... teeth... yah."

Peter has some type of an appointment with a dentist and someone has to go to a doctor or came from or is involved with.. yep :) --Cyberman 20:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC) Scientists say Broca's Area when damaged is serve to the way we talk. Broca disected 8 brains in total of people (already dead) who couldn't speak. He found that their brains were all damaged servely in the same area. Therefore this is why we call that area today Broca's area

Too many run on sentences, when your introducing a new cocept it doesnt help if you can't remember what the beginning of the sentence was talking about.-Rooktje

This is coming long after intial dialogue...but here goes. Broca's is part of what one MIGHT refer to as a "motor speech area". The fact is that Broca's area is not a rigid area in every brain, but it is located mainly in what is called the motor association cortex of the brain. This area is sort of like the "mixer" that turns the butter an sugar into cookie dough for lack of a better metaphor. It is thought that the association areas of the brain are where memories for different things are stored. Wernicke orignially posited that Broca's area governed "motor memories" and this seems to be the case. Damage to Broca's shows the following symptoms in varying intensities and combinations:Non-fluent speech, slow,halting speech, loss of ability to "find" certain words, difficulty pronouncing words and loss of prosody (agrammatism, anomia, articulation difficulty). Athough the right hemisphere is ultimately responsible for prosody, for some reason Broca's (on the left) seems to be connected as well. True apraxia would be damage to the ventral primary motor cortex. Broca's aphasia is not a dysfuntcion of the actual motor connections as they pertain to the mechanical operation of the lips, tongue, etc; but to part of the motor association cortex that stores motor memories and allows their retrieval. It is in an area that works to integrate all the different aspects of the brain's motor systems.Cherokeechild 00:03, 14 May 2007 (UTC)cherokeechild

Sorry for the addition, but I think there may be a mistake in the last paragraph. As I recall, functional studies by Brown (2005) found that people who stutter have GREATER/increased activation of neuronal pathways in Broca's area...not less. You might check data as reported by Neil Carlson, Physiology of Behavior (2007), I think.Cherokeechild 00:16, 14 May 2007 (UTC)cherokeechild

""Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... ......." My Psych textbook quotes this differently. Basically, alot of the er's and ah's are gone... and he says 'Dad and Dick'... 203.55.195.106 06:51, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Broca's is not simply an organ for syntax

Have removed the universal grammar section. Very few people (maybe Grodzinsky, but I can't think of any others of note) now believe that this area is dedicated to parsing syntax, which is what this section would lead you to conclude. This part of the IFG participates in hundreds of cognitive functions, not all of them language related. As far as language itself is concerned, fMRI investigations have shown an involvement in semantic processing, even at the single word level - i.e. in the absence of any syntactic processing demand. Crudely put, current opinion seems to be that the anterior part (BA45) is involved in (probably multimodal) semantic processing, wheras the posterior part (BA44) appears to play a role in phonological processing. Even more crudely put, the front bit of Broca's probably helps us deal with the meaning of language, the back bit helps us deal with the sounds of language Terry Toweling 22:18, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Broca's area is equivalent to Motor Speech center.. should add the link. -- econner 29 November 2007

I don't believe you can pinpoint Broca's area to any particular language feature. Yes, it is primarily motor speech - but, it probably is involved in other functions at a level we don't completely understand. --Anthropos65 (talk) 15:21, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] It could have been present already in the common ancestor of humans and chimps

Quoting from Science Daily:

In the new study, the researchers non-invasively scanned the brains of three chimpanzees as they gestured and called to a person in request for food that was out of their reach. Those chimps showed activation in the brain region corresponding to Broca's area and in other areas involved in complex motor planning and action in humans, the researchers found. - Science Daily, February 28, "Chimps May Have A 'Language-ready' Brain"

--Extremophile (talk) 13:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)