Study Adds to Understanding of Language and the Brain

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com A new study of the brain is helping scientists better understand how humans process language. The study is being done in the American cities of San Diego, California; Boston, Massachusetts and New York. One of the patients is a woman with epilepsy. Doctors are monitoring Denise Harris to see if she is a good candidate for an operation that could stop her seizures. They are monitoring her through wire electrodes implanted in her brain. But while she is in the hospital, she is also helping scientists understand how the brain works with language. The study centers on a part of the frontal lobe called Broca's area. Pierre Paul Broca was a nineteenth century French doctor. He first recognized the big part that this small area plays in language. The electrode implants have shown that the area very quickly processes three different language functions. Eric Halgren at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine is one of the main investigators. He says they found different regions doing, at different times, different processes all within a centimeter. The first function deals with recognizing a word. The second deals with understanding the word's meaning within a sentence. And the third lets us speak the word. Harvard University brain expert Steven Pinker is another author of the study. A report on the work appeared in the journal Science. Ned Sahin, a research

Published 2010-02-10 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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