What brain regions control our language?

And how do we know this?

When you read something, you first need to detect the words and then to
interpret them by determining context and meaning. This complex process
involves many brain regions.

Detecting text usually involves the optic nerve and other nerve bundles
delivering signals from the eyes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. If
you are reading in Braille, you use the sensory cortex towards the top of the
brain. If you listen to someone else reading, then you use the auditory
cortex not far from your ears.

A system of regions towards the back and middle of your brain help you
interpret the text. These include the angular gyrus in the parietal
lobe, Wernicke’s area (comprising mainly the top rear portion of the
temporal lobe), insular cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum.
These regions work together as a network to process words and word
sequences to determine context and meaning. This enables our receptive
language abilities, which means the ability to understand language.
Complementary to this is expressive language, which is the ability to produce
language.

To speak sensibly, you must think of words to convey an idea or message,

formulate them into a sentence according to grammatical rules and then use
your lungs, vocal cords and mouth to create sounds. Regions in your frontal,
temporal and parietal lobes formulate what you want to say and the motor
cortex, in your frontal lobe, enables you to speak the words.

Most of this language-related brain activity is likely occurring in the left side
of your brain. But some people use an even mix of both sides and, rarely,
some have right dominance for language. There is an evolutionary view
that specialization of certain functions to one side or the other may be an
advantage, as many animals, especially vertebrates, exhibit brain function
with prominence on one side.

Why the left side is favored for language isn’t known. But we do know that
injury or conditions such as epilepsy, if it affects the left side of the
brain early in a child’s development, can increase the chances language will
develop on the right side. The chance of the person being left-handed is also
increased. This makes sense, because the left side of the body is controlled
by the motor cortex on the right side of the brain.

Selective problems
In 1861, French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca described a patient unable to
speak who had no motor impairments to account for the inability. A
postmortem examination showed a lesion in a large area towards the lower
middle of his left frontal lobe particularly important in language formulation.
This is now known as Broca’s area.

The clinical symptom of being unable to speak despite having the motor skills
is known as expressive aphasia, or Broca’s aphasia.

In 1867, Carl Wernicke observed an opposite phenomenon. A patient was

able to speak but not understand language. This is known as receptive
aphasia, or Wernicke’s aphasia. The damaged region, as you might correctly
guess, is the Wernicke’s area mentioned above.

Scientists have also observed injured patients with other selective problems,

such as an inability to understand most words except nouns; or words with
unusual spelling, such as those with silent consonants, like reign.

These difficulties are thought to arise from damage to selective areas or

connections between regions in the brain’s language network. However,
precise localization can often be difficult given the complexity of individuals’
symptoms and the uncontrolled nature of their brain injury.

We also know the brain’s language regions work together as a coordinated

network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of
redundancy in some processing pathways. So it’s not simply a matter of one
brain region doing one thing in isolation.

How do we know all this?

Before advanced medical imaging, most of our knowledge came from
observing unfortunate patients with injuries to particular brain parts. One
could relate the approximate region of damage to their specific symptoms.
Broca’s and Wernicke’s observations are well-known examples.

Other knowledge was inferred from brain-stimulation studies. Weak

electrical stimulation of the brain while a patient is awake is sometimes
performed in patients undergoing surgery to remove a lesion such as a
tumor. The stimulation causes that part of the brain to stop working for a few
seconds, which can enable the surgeon to identify areas of critically
important function to avoid damaging during surgery.

In the mid-20th century, this helped neurosurgeons discover more about

the localisation of language function in the brain. It was clearly demonstrated
that while most people have language originating on the left side of their
brain, some could have language originating on the right.

Towards the later part of the 20th century, if a surgeon needed to find out
which side of your brain was responsible for language – so he didn’t do any
damage – he would put to sleep one side of your brain with an anaesthetic.
The doctor would then ask you a series of questions, determining your
language side from your ability or inability to answer them. This invasive test
(which is less often used today due to the availability of functional brain
imaging) is known as the Wada test, named after Juhn Wada, who first
described it just after the second world war.

Brain imaging
Today, we can get a much better view of brain function by using imaging
techniques, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a safe procedure
that uses magnetic fields to take pictures of your brain.

Using MRI to measure brain function is called functional MRI (fMRI), which
detects signals from magnetic properties of blood in vessels supplying oxygen
to brain cells. The fMRI signal changes depending on whether the blood is
carrying oxygen, which means it slightly reduces the magnetic field, or has
delivered up its oxygen, which slightly increases the magnetic field.

A few seconds after brain neurons become active in a brain region, there is
an increase in freshly oxygenated blood flow to that brain part, much more
than required to satisfy the oxygen demand of the neurons. This is what we
see when we say a brain region is activated during certain functions.

Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is

involved in language processing than previously thought. We now know
that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and
temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are
involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.

Functional MRI is also becoming a useful clinical tool. In some centers it has
replaced the Wada test to determine where language is in the brain.

Scientists are also using fMRI to build up a finer picture of how the brain
processes language by designing experiments that compare which areas are
active during various tasks. For instance, researchers have
observed differences in brain language regions of dyslexic children compared
to those without dyslexia.
Researchers compared fMRI images of groups of children with and without
dyslexia while they performed language-related tasks. They found that
dyslexic children had, on average, less activity in Broca’s area mainly on the
left during this task. They also had less activity in or near Wernicke’s area on
the left and right, and a portion of the front of the temporal lobe on the right.

Could this type of brain imaging provide a diagnostic signature of dyslexia?

This is a work-in-progress, but we hope further study will one day lead to a
robust, objective and early brain-imaging test for dyslexia and other
disorders.

APA reference:
Abbott, D. (2016, September, 26). What brain regions control our language?
And how do we know this? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-
brain-regions-control-our-language-and-how-do-we-know-this-63318