16 Facts About Broca's area

Broca's area, or the Broca area, is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the brain with functions linked to speech production.

Broca's area is typically defined in terms of the pars opercularis and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, represented in Brodmann's cytoarchitectonic map as Brodmann area 44 and Brodmann area 45 of the dominant hemisphere.

Broca's area is often identified by visual inspection of the topography of the brain either by macrostructural landmarks such as sulci or by the specification of coordinates in a particular reference space.

However, there is evidence to demonstrate that Broca's area plays a significant role in language comprehension.

The increase in reaction times is indicative that that particular Broca's area is responsible for processing that cognitive function.

Recent experiments have indicated that Broca's area is involved in various cognitive and perceptual tasks.

Damage to Broca's area is commonly associated with telegraphic speech made up of content vocabulary.

Patients with expressive aphasia, known as Broca's area aphasia, are individuals who know "what they want to say, they just cannot get it out".

Lesions to Broca's area alone do not result in Broca's aphasia, nor do Broca's aphasic patients necessarily have lesions in Broca's area.

Still, Broca's area frequently emerges in functional imaging studies of sentence processing.

Broca's area can show activation in such non-linguistic tasks as imagery of motion.

Miyake, Carpenter, and Just have proposed that sentence processing relies on such general verbal working memory mechanisms, while Caplan and Waters consider Broca's area to be involved in working memory specifically for syntactic processing.

Broca's area has been previously associated with a variety of processes, including phonological segmentation, syntactic processing, and unification, all of which involve segmenting and linking different types of linguistic information.

Broca's area was able to repetitively produce only the word tan.

The recent finding that Broca's area is active when people are observing others engaged in meaningful action is evidence in support of this idea.

The study, therefore, claims that Broca's area is the "motor center for speech", which assembles and decodes speech sounds in the same way it interprets body language and gestures.