Language and
communication are as vital as food and water. We communicate to exchange
information, build relationships, and create art. In this Spotlight feature, we
look at how language manifests in the brain, and how it shapes our daily lives.
We are all born within a
language, so to speak, and that typically becomes our mother tongue.
Along the way, we may pick
up one or more extra languages, which bring with them the potential to unlock
different cultures and experiences.
Language is a complex topic,
interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and art.
As author Jhumpa Lahiri
notes meditatively in the novel The Lowlands, "Language, identity, place, home: these are all
of a piece — just different elements of belonging and not-belonging."
But when did our ancestors
first develop spoken language, what are the brain's "language
centers," and how does multilingualism impact our mental processes?
We will look at these
questions, and more, in this Spotlight feature about language and the brain.
1. What makes human language
special?
When did spoken language
first emerge as a tool of communication, and how is it different from the way
in which other animals communicate?
As Prof. Mark Pagel, at the
School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading in the United
Kingdom, explains in
a "question and answer" feature for BMC Biology, human language is quite a
unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom.
While other
animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance,
the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such
communications are typically "repetitive instrumental acts" that lack
a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences.
By contrast, Prof. Pagel
adds, human language has two distinctive characteristics. These are:
that it is
"compositional," meaning that it "allows speakers to express
thoughts in sentences comprising subjects, verbs, and objects"
that it is
"referential," meaning that "speakers use it to exchange
specific information with each other about people or objects and their
locations or actions"
2. Origins and importance of
language
As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary
biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language,
the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to
create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
Though it
remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to
develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors
emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex
speech is likely at least as old as that.
It is also likely that
possessing spoken language has helped our ancestors survive and thrive in the
face of natural hardships.
Partly thanks to their
ability to communicate complex ideas, Prof. Pagel says, "humans can adapt
at the cultural level, acquiring the knowledge and producing the tools,
shelters, clothing, and other artefacts necessary for survival in diverse
habitats."
"Possessing language, humans
have had a high-fidelity code for transmitting detailed information down the
generations. Many [...] of the things we make use of in our everyday lives rely
on specialized knowledge or skills to produce." Prof. Mark Pagel
3. Language in the brain
But where, exactly, is
language located in the brain? Research has identified two primary
"language centers," which are both located on the left side of the
brain.
These
are Broca's area, tasked with directing the processes that lead to
speech utterance, and Wernicke's
area, whose main role is to "decode" speech.
If a person experienced a
brain injury resulting in damage to one of these areas, it would impair their
ability to speak and comprehend what is said.
Source: Medical News Today
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