Broca's area

Psychosis-related experiences, including hallucinations, paranoia, emotional blunting, and
reduced motivation, are commonly conceptualised within biopsychosocial frameworks
involving genetic vulnerability, neurodevelopmental variation, environmental stress, and
neurochemical dysregulation. However, comparatively less emphasis has been placed on
the developmental formation of internal voice structure and its interaction with stress
physiology and self-monitoring systems.
This paper proposes an integrative developmental model in which early relational trauma
contributes to the internalisation of a dominant caregiver-derived voice, suppression of the
authentic self-voice, and formation of persistent internal voice conflict. Chronic exposure to
fear-based environments may contribute to hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis
dysregulation, sustained hypervigilance, and threat-biased processing.
The model further proposes that chronic stress-related processes may interact with
neurochemical systems, including dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways, influencing the
coordinated functioning of neural networks involved in inner speech generation, auditory
processing, self-monitoring, and higher-order regulation. Under later triggers, reduced
prefrontal regulation and heightened conflict monitoring may amplify internally generated,
fear-linked content. When self-monitoring processes are compromised, these experiences
may be misattributed as external, contributing to voice-hearing and paranoia.
In parallel, the model proposes that emotional flatness and reduced motivation may arise
from sustained system overactivation followed by functional attenuation, including freezedominant survival responses, learned helplessness, and alterations in reward-related
processing. Amplification-related and attenuation-related symptoms are conceptualised as
potentially co-occurring, reflecting differential dysregulation across interacting systems.
This framework is presented as a theoretical model intended to generate hypotheses for
future empirical investigation.

Neuromagnetic spectral distributions when silently viewing words and non-words were investigated using a 151-channel whole head MEG system. The data were analyzed with synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM). The dominant changes of spectral power were identi®ed in the parietal and occipital cortices in 15±30 Hz, 30±60 Hz and 60±125 Hz bands following both word and non-word stimulations. The changes in Broca's and Wernicke's areas were consistently observed in 60±125 Hz bands, mainly following word stimulation. The results indicated that the occipital and parietal cortices were most probably involved in visuospatial processing of words and non-words. The language areas, particularly Broca's and Wernickes's areas, might be involved in implicit word processing such as verbal searching and/or internal speech.

To investigate the motor control related to sound production, we studied cortical rhythmic changes during continuous vocalization such as singing. Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses were recorded while subjects spoke in the usual way (speaking), sang (singing), hummed (humming) and imagined (imagining) a popular song. The power of alpha (8-15 Hz), beta (15-30 Hz) and low-gamma (30-60 Hz) frequency bands was changed during and after vocalization (singing, speaking and humming). In the alpha band, the oscillatory changes for singing were most pronounced in the right premotor, bilateral sensorimotor, right secondary somatosensory and bilateral superior parietal areas. The beta oscillation for the singing was also confirmed in the premotor, primary and secondary sensorimotor and superior parietal areas in the left and right hemispheres where were partly activated even for imagined a song (imaging). These regions have been traditionally described as vocalization-related sites. The cortical rhythmic changes were distinct in the singing condition compared with the other vocalizing conditions (speaking and humming) and thus we considered that more concentrated control of the vocal tract, diaphragm and abdominal muscles is responsible. Furthermore, characteristic oscillation in the high-gamma (60-200 Hz) frequency band was found in Broca's area only in the imaging condition and might occur singing rehearsal and storage process in Broca's area.

The protracted postnatal development and heightened neuroplasticity of the human brain, driven by the co-evolution of social complexity, technological innovation, and cultural transmission, led to the emergence of a "mind" uniquely capable of constructing predictive models of reality and externalizing knowledge, thereby optimizing collective intelligence and ensuring species survival even at the cost of individual brain volume. Primer Before delving deeper, let us entertain few allegories.

The most compelling evidence to date for involvement of the Basal Ganglia (BG) (Basal Ganglia1 Grammar) [13, 16, 20, 27, 48] in natural language comes to us from theoretical movement operations (nested dependency, distant binding and trace-theory). This implication of BG overlaps with well-established evidence showing Broca’s involvement with movement [39]. Dual pathways are a marked characteristic of BG insofar that in cascading down-stream neural networks, both direct as well as indirect paths affect admixed neuronal populations from multiple cortical areas [20]. A tentative proposal may suggest that any notion of duality at the subcortical level may have the ability to simulate what we know of local vs distant binding dependencies as found in Dual Mechanism Model accounts of natural language [2, 7].

"Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us. We learn it, we use it, and we seldom think about it. But once we start thinking about it, language seems like a sheer wonder. Language is an extremely complex entity with several subcomponents responsible for the language sound, the word’s meaning, and the grammatical rules governing the relation between words".

The human brain represents a pinnacle of evolutionary innovation, characterized by its remarkable size relative to body mass, complex neural connectivity, and unparalleled cognitive abilities. Understanding the evolutionary trajectory of the human brain requires a comparative analysis of brain structure and function across species. This review explores the evolutionary milestones of brain development, with an emphasis on primates, early hominins, and modern humans. Drawing on fossil, genetic, and neurobiological evidence, we investigate the selective pressures driving brain expansion and specialization, and the implications for human behavior, cognition, and neurodegenerative diseases. Additionally, we discuss recent discoveries, including geneculture coevolution and the influence of epigenetic factors, providing a broader context for understanding the evolutionary uniqueness of the human brain.

mind-control project

Is a complex and controversial topic: Discussing its ethical implications, scientific research, or perhaps fictional portrayals in literature and media!

Regarding my Eight digital publication:

continue with the postmodernist sequence of mass distribution, inherited from the printing press to upload —-my Apple of knowledge—, in the branch of free knowledge, without an editorial review. Trying to influence the collective imagination of societies that are no longer surprised by anything.

Phaneinthymos Media Group Inc. | Phanerothyme Mexico City, Mexico 2024.

1st Edition
Issue #0 
Rodrigo Granda. Thursday 20 June 2024, 20:51 GMT


The mind is a complex and multifaceted aspect of human consciousness and cognition. It encompasses various mental processes such as thoughts, perceptions, emotions, memories, and reasoning abilities. While there isn't a universally agreed-upon definition due to its intricacy, the mind generally refers to the totality of conscious and unconscious mental activities that enable individuals to perceive, interpret, and interact with the world around them.

From a scientific perspective, the mind is often studied in fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. These disciplines explore how the brain functions to generate thoughts and behaviors, how memories are formed and recalled, and how emotions are experienced and regulated. Understanding the mind involves investigating neural mechanisms, psychological processes, and their interconnections.

Philosophically, the mind raises questions about consciousness, self-awareness, and the nature of subjective experience. It's a topic that has fascinated thinkers for centuries, prompting debates about the relationship between mind and body (known as the mind-body problem), the existence of free will, and the implications of artificial intelligence on our understanding of cognition.

In summary, while the mind can be challenging to define precisely, it represents the sum total of cognitive processes and conscious experiences that define human thought and behavior.

Recent studies showed that multiple sclerosis (MS) patients might experience communicative deficits, specifically in pragmatics (i.e., the ability to integrate the context-dependent aspects of language). A crucial region for pragmatics is the temporo-parietal junction, in particular the so-called Geschwind's area (GA), which is involved in high-level language processes, including the comprehension of narratives, metaphor, and irony. We evaluated the relationship between pragmatic abilities, measured through the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) test, and the functional connectivity (FC) of the bilateral GAs, assessed through a seed-based analysis of Resting-State fMRI in patients with MS. A positive correlation was observed between APACS scores and the FC for both the right and the left GA and the paracingulate cortex. Our findings suggest that the brain FC for social communication involves connections extending over both hemispheres, including r...

One of the most human characteristics is certainly language. Language is the means through which people communicate with each other both orally and in written form. Language represents one of the most important social behaviors, and thanks to language humans have been able to accumulate knowledge and transmit it from one generation to the next. The present paper will analyze how the human body has changed and evolved in response to the environmental solicitations and stimuli that have given origin to the development of a structured language, and parallel this with how, in turn, medical language has changed in the past years in response to social and cultural modifications.

The fundamental distinction of grammatical deficits in aphasia, agrammatism and paragrammatism, was made over a century ago. However, the extent to which the agrammatism/paragrammatism distinction exists independently of differences in speech fluency has not clearly been investigated. Despite much research on agrammatism, the lesion correlates of paragrammatism are essentially unknown. Lesion-symptom mapping was used to investigate the degree to which the lesion correlates of agrammatism and paragrammatism overlap or dissociate. Four expert raters assessed videos of 53 right-handed patients with aphasia following chronic left-hemisphere stroke retelling the Cinderella story. Consensus discussion determined each subject's classification with respect to grammatical deficits as Agrammatic, Paragrammatic, Both, or No Grammatical Deficit. Each subject's lesion was manually drawn on a high-resolution MRI and warped to standard space for group analyses. Lesion-symptom mapping analyses were performed in NiiStat including lesion volume as a covariate. Secondary analyses included speech rate (words per minute) as an additional covariate. Region of interest analyses identified a double dissociation between these syndromes: damage to Broca's area was significantly associated with agrammatism, p = 0.001 (but not paragrammatism, p = 0.930), while damage to the left posterior superior and middle temporal gyri was significantly associated with paragrammatism, p < 0.001 (but not agrammatism, p = 0.873). The same results obtained when regressing out the effect of speech rate, and nonoverlapping lesion distributions between the syndromes were confirmed by uncorrected whole brain analyses. Our results support a fundamental distinction between agrammatism and paragrammatism.

The fundamental distinction of grammatical deficits in aphasia, agrammatism and paragrammatism, was made over a century ago. However, the extent to which the agrammatism/paragrammatism distinction exists independently of differences in speech fluency has not clearly been investigated. Despite much research on agrammatism, the lesion correlates of paragrammatism are essentially unknown. Lesion-symptom mapping was used to investigate the degree to which the lesion correlates of agrammatism and paragrammatism overlap or dissociate. Four expert raters assessed videos of 53 right-handed patients with aphasia following chronic left hemisphere stroke retelling the Cinderella story. Consensus discussion determined each subject’s classification with respect to grammatical deficits as Agrammatic, Paragrammatic, Both, or No Grammatical Deficit. Each subject’s lesion was manually drawn on a high-resolution MRI and warped to standard space for group analyses. Lesion-symptom mapping analyses were...

Grodzinsky examines Broca's aphasia in terms of some specific grammatical deficits. However, his grammatical models offer no way to characterize the distinctions he observes. Rather than grammatical deficits, his patients seem to have intact grammars but defective modules of parsing and production.

We describe an effort to map lesion to behavior by studying the comprehension of complex VP-Ellipsis constructions (e.g., The policeman defended the child, and the dedicated fireman did___ too…) in participants with Broca"s aphasia. We quantified the lesions of our individual participants using cytoarchitectonic probability maps of the human brain. We found that our Broca participants evinced delayed priming of the object in the ellipsis clause, while off-line comprehension was largely spared. Structure-function analyses revealed that lesions in both temporal and frontal areas participated in the behavioral outcomes, though each region seems to have played a distinct role.

The role of Broca's area in sentence processing is hotly debated. Prominent hypotheses include that Broca's area supports sentence comprehension via syntax-specific processes ("syntactic movement" in particular), hierarchical structure building or working memory. In the present fMRI study we adopt a within subject, across task approach using targeted sentence-level contrasts and non-sentential comparison tasks to address these hypotheses regarding the role of Broca's area in sentence processing. For clarity, we have presented findings as three experiments: (i) Experiment 1 examines selectivity for a particular type of sentence construction, namely those containing syntactic movement. Standard syntactic movement distance effects in Broca's area were replicated but no difference was found between movement and non-movement sentences in Broca's area at the group level or consistently in individual subjects. (ii) Experiment 2 examines selectivity for sentences versus non-sentences, to assess claims regarding the role of Broca's area in hierarchical structure building. Group and individual results differ, but both identify subregions of Broca's area that are selective for sentence structure. (iii) Experiment 3 assesses whether activations in Broca's area are selective for sentences when contrasted with simple subvocal articulation. Group results suggest shared resources for sentence processing and articulation in Broca's area, but individual subject analyses contradict this finding. We conclude that Broca's area is not selectively involved in processing syntactic movement, but that subregions are selectively responsive to sentence structure. Our findings also reinforce Fedorenko & Kanwishser's call for the use of more individual subject analyses in functional imaging studies of sentence processing in Broca's area, as group findings can obscure selective response patterns.

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks have been found to be engaged by increased computational demands during sentence comprehension, while event-reated brain potentials have been used to study the on-line manifestation of these demands. However, evidence regarding the spatiotemporal organization of brain networks in this domain is scarce. In the current study we used Magnetoencephalography to track spatiotemporally brain activity while Spanish speakers were reading subject-and object-first cleft sentences. Both kinds of sentences remained ambiguous between a subject-first or an object-first interpretation up to the appearance of the second argument. Results show the time-modulation of a frontal network at the disambiguation point of object-first sentences. Moreover, the time windows where these effects took place have been previously related to thematic role integration (300-500 ms) and to sentence reanalysis and resolution of conflicts during processing (beyond 500 ms post-stimulus). These results point to frontal cognitive control as a putative key mechanism which may operate when a revision of the sentence structure and meaning is necessary.

Pretrained language models that have been trained to predict the next word over billions of text documents have been shown to also significantly predict brain recordings of people comprehending language. Understanding the reasons behind the observed similarities between language in machines and language in the brain can lead to more insight into both systems. Recent works suggest that the prediction of the next word is a key mechanism that contributes to the alignment between the two. What is not yet understood is whether prediction of the next word is necessary for this observed alignment or simply sufficient, and whether there are other shared mechanisms or information that is similarly important. In this work, we take a first step towards a better understanding via two simple perturbations in a popular pretrained language model. The first perturbation is to improve the model's ability to predict the next word in the specific naturalistic stimulus text that the brain recordings correspond to. We show that this indeed improves the alignment with the brain recordings. However, this improved alignment may also be due to any improved word-level or multi-word level semantics for the specific world that is described by the stimulus narrative. We aim to disentangle the contribution of next word prediction and semantic knowledge via our second perturbation: scrambling the word order at inference time, which reduces the ability to predict the next word, but maintains any newly learned word-level semantics. By comparing the alignment with brain recordings of these differently perturbed models, we show that improvements in alignment with brain recordings are due to more than improvements in next word prediction and word-level semantics.

Language is a combinatory system able to create an infinite array of complex meanings frommemory representations in our mental dictionary. How is this integrative process neurally implemented? Studies on the processing of structured vs. unstructured language stimuli have identified a largely left-lateral “combinatory network,” with the anterior temporal lobe as its most consistent integrative node, likely contributing the first stage of a multi-stage combinatory process. This chapter summarizes our current understanding of the neurobiology of composition, with a focus on three paradigms from extant literature that most directly address the basic process of combining words into phrases and sentences: the so-called sentence vs. list paradigm, the two-word phrase paradigm and approaches using model comparison with natural narratives as stimuli.

Research investigating the brain basis of language comprehension has associated the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) with sentence-level combinatorics. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we test the parsing strategy implemented in this brain region. The number of incremental parse steps from a predictive left-corner parsing strategy that is supported by psycholinguistic research is compared with those from a less-predictive strategy. We test for a correlation between parse steps and source-localized MEG activity recorded while participants read a story. Left-corner parse steps correlated with activity in the left ATL around 350-500 ms after word onset. No other correlations specific to sentence comprehension were observed. These data indicate that the left ATL engages in combinatoric processing that is well characterized by a predictive left-corner parsing strategy.

Human language allows us to create an infinitude of ideas from a finite set of basic building blocks. What is the neurobiology of this combinatory system? Research has begun to dissect the neural basis of natural language syntax and semantics by analyzing the basics of meaning composition, such as two-word phrases. This work has revealed a system of composition that involves rapidly peaking activity in the left anterior temporal lobe and later engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex. Both brain regions show evidence of shared processing between comprehension and production, as well as between spoken and signed language. Both appear to compute meaning, not syntactic structure. This Review discusses how language builds meaning and lays out directions for future neurobiological research on the combinatory system.

Recent studies showed that multiple sclerosis (MS) patients might experience communicative deficits, specifically in pragmatics (i.e., the ability to integrate the context-dependent aspects of language). A crucial region for pragmatics is the temporo-parietal junction, in particular the so-called Geschwind&#39;s area (GA), which is involved in high-level language processes, including the comprehension of narratives, metaphor, and irony. We evaluated the relationship between pragmatic abilities, measured through the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) test, and the functional connectivity (FC) of the bilateral GAs, assessed through a seed-based analysis of Resting-State fMRI in patients with MS. A positive correlation was observed between APACS scores and the FC for both the right and the left GA and the paracingulate cortex. Our findings suggest that the brain FC for social communication involves connections extending over both hemispheres, including r...

Reading or hearing a sentence such as 'The little old man knocked out the giant wrestler' demonstrates the crucial role of syntax in normal language understanding. Identifying who did what to whom enables humans to understand the unlikely scenario that is described here. Thus, syntactic information helps us combine the words we hear or read in a particular way such that we can extract the meaning of sentences (see Box 1). Many regard syntax as a cognitive module that is separable from other more general cognitive processes such as memory and attention [1] and whose properties can be distinguished from semantic-conceptual information ('meaning') [2]. In this tradition, some theories of sentence processing propose a separate syntactic processing mechanism that is insensitive to nonsyntactic information [3]. However, alternative views exist [4,5]. Given these competing views of syntax, one can ask whether there is neurological evidence in favor of a syntactic processing module [1]; that is, is there a specific area in the brain that is specialized for syntax alone? Evidence from brain lesions Research on the relationship between brain and language dates back to the mid-to late-1800s when Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke linked specific lesions in the brain to specific language deficits known as aphasia. Broca identified patients with problems in Syntactic comprehension is a fundamental aspect of human language, and has distinct properties from other aspects of language (e.g. semantics). In this article, we aim to identify if there is a specific locus of syntax in the brain by reviewing imaging studies on syntactic processing. We conclude that results from neuroimaging support evidence from neuropsychology that syntactic processing does not recruit one specific area. Instead a network of areas including Broca's area and anterior, middle and superior areas of the temporal lobes is involved. However, none of these areas appears to be syntax specific.

Regions within the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) have simultaneously been implicated in syntactic processing and cognitive control. Accounts attempting to unify LIFG's function hypothesize that, during comprehension, cognitive control resolves conflict between incompatible representations of sentence meaning. Some studies demonstrate co-localized activity within LIFG for syntactic and non-syntactic conflict resolution, suggesting domain-generality, but others show non-overlapping activity, suggesting domain-specific cognitive control and/or regions that respond uniquely to syntax. We propose however that examining exclusive activation sites for certain contrasts creates a false dichotomy: both domain-general and domain-specific neural machinery must coordinate to facilitate conflict resolution across domains. Here, subjects completed four diverse tasks involving conflict-one syntactic, three non-syntactic-while undergoing fMRI. Though LIFG consistently activated within individuals during conflict processing, functional connectivity analyses revealed task-specific coordination with distinct brain networks. Thus, LIFG may function as a conflict-resolution "hub" that cooperates with specialized neural systems according to information content.

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks have been found to be engaged by increased computational demands during sentence comprehension, while event-reated brain potentials have been used to study the on-line manifestation of these demands. However, evidence regarding the spatiotemporal organization of brain networks in this domain is scarce. In the current study we used Magnetoencephalography to track spatiotemporally brain activity while Spanish speakers were reading subject-and object-first cleft sentences. Both kinds of sentences remained ambiguous between a subject-first or an object-first interpretation up to the appearance of the second argument. Results show the time-modulation of a frontal network at the disambiguation point of object-first sentences. Moreover, the time windows where these effects took place have been previously related to thematic role integration (300-500 ms) and to sentence reanalysis and resolution of conflicts during processing (beyond 500 ms post-stimulus). These results point to frontal cognitive control as a putative key mechanism which may operate when a revision of the sentence structure and meaning is necessary.

ABSTRACT FOR WEB VERSION OF BOOK This monograph is on the evolutionary importance of music for hominin communication and in particular the emergence of a sing-song gestural proto language(or clusters of such languages) in early hunter-gatherer forms of the Homo genus from around one million years ago. The more complex messages of this primordial language consisted of holistic combinations or strings of utterances, melodic pitches and gestures that had to be learnt and expressed in their entirety, although a slight degree of lexical juggling of the components of these combinatory phrases was possible. Inspite of not being a fully open grammatical, this proto language that some refer to a ‘musilanguage’ was, nevertheless, capable of transmitting simple symbolic information. For this hypothetical language the monogram draws on primate studies, the fossil record, adult-infant communication, genetics, cognitive studies, linguistics, musicology: and the fact that the very first although slight archaeological evidence symbolic behaviour appears in the Homo genus from around 600,000 years ago As such, the Homo-made musilanguage represents a halfway house between instinctive primate communication and grammatical language that appeared in modern humans around 200,000 years ago. A short synopsis of the ideas presented in this book is also found in my chapter entitled ‘Nine Reasons that Support Prehistoric Hominin Musicality and Musilanguage’ in the 2020 book ‘Music in Human Experience: Perspectives on a Musical Species’ edited by Johnathan Friedmann, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. [ISBN (10): 1-5275-8010-5 & (13): 978-1-5275-8010-7]

ABSTRACT FOR WEB VERSION OF BOOK This monograph is on the evolutionary importance of music for hominin communication and in particular the emergence of a sing-song gestural proto language(or clusters of such languages) in early hunter-gatherer forms of the Homo genus from around one million years ago. The more complex messages of this primordial language consisted of holistic combinations or strings of utterances, melodic pitches and gestures that had to be learnt and expressed in their entirety, although a slight degree of lexical juggling of the components of these combinatory phrases was possible. Inspite of not being a fully open grammatical, this proto language that some refer to a ‘musilanguage’ was, nevertheless, capable of transmitting simple symbolic information. For this hypothetical language the monogram draws on primate studies, the fossil record, adult-infant communication, genetics, cognitive studies, linguistics, musicology: and the fact that the very first although slight archaeological evidence symbolic behaviour appears in the Homo genus from around 600,000 years ago As such, the Homo-made musilanguage represents a halfway house between instinctive primate communication and grammatical language that appeared in modern humans around 200,000 years ago. A short synopsis of the ideas presented in this book is also found in my chapter entitled ‘Nine Reasons that Support Prehistoric Hominin Musicality and Musilanguage’ in the 2020 book ‘Music in Human Experience: Perspectives on a Musical Species’ edited by Johnathan Friedmann, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. [ISBN (10): 1-5275-8010-5 & (13): 978-1-5275-8010-7]

In the sentence “The captain who the sailor greeted is tall,” the connection between the relative pronoun and the object position of greeted represents a long-distance dependency (LDD), necessary for the interpretation of “the captain” as the individual being greeted. Whereas the lesion-based record shows preferential involvement of only the left inferior frontal (LIF) cortex, associated with Broca’s aphasia, during real-time comprehension of LDDs, the neuroimaging record shows additional involvement of the left posterior superior temporal (LPST) and lower parietal cortices, which are associated with Wernicke’s aphasia. We test the hypothesis that this localization incongruence emerges from an interaction of memory and linguistic constraints involved in the real-time implementation of these dependencies and which had not been previously isolated. Capitalizing on a long-standing psycholinguistic understanding of LDDs as the workings of an active filler, we distinguish two linguistica...

Broca's area is preferentially activated by reversible sentences with complex syntax, but various linguistic factors may be responsible for this finding, including syntactic movement, working-memory demands, and post hoc reanalysis. To distinguish between these, we tested the interaction of syntactic complexity and semantic reversibility in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of sentence--picture matching. During auditory comprehension, semantic reversibility induced selective activation throughout the left perisylvian language network. In contrast, syntactic complexity (object-embedded vs. subject-embedded relative clauses) within reversible sentences engaged only the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left precentral gyrus. Within irreversible sentences, only the LIFG was sensitive to syntactic complexity, confirming a unique role for this region in syntactic processing. Nonetheless, larger effects of reversibility itself occurred in the same regions, suggesting that full syntactic parsing may be a nonautomatic process applied as needed. Complex reversible sentences also induced enhanced signals in LIFG and left precentral regions on subsequent picture selection, but with additional recruitment of the right hemisphere homolog area (right inferior frontal gyrus) as well, suggesting that post hoc reanalysis of sentence structure, compared with initial comprehension, engages an overlapping but larger network of brain regions. These dissociable effects may offer a basis for studying the reorganization of receptive language function after brain damage.

Theories of language organization in the brain commonly posit that different regions underlie distinct linguistic mechanisms. However, such theories have been criticized on the grounds that many neuroimaging studies of language processing find similar effects across regions. Moreover, condition by region interaction effects, which provide the strongest evidence of functional differentiation between regions, have rarely been offered in support of these theories. Here we address this by using lesion-symptom mapping in two large, partially-overlapping groups of aphasia patients with left hemisphere brain damage due to stroke (N=121, N=92). We identified multiple measure by region interaction effects, associating damage to the posterior middle temporal gyrus with syntactic comprehension deficits, damage to posterior inferior frontal gyrus with expressive agrammatism, and damage to inferior angular gyrus with semantic category word fluency deficits. Our results are inconsistent with recent hypotheses that regions of the language network are undifferentiated with respect to high-level linguistic processing.

We are usually not aware of the process of speaking, as we are unconscious of our breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide; as if they are automatic and effortless. We become conscious of our breathing only when we gasp for a little air and likewise, fumbling for the right word very often makes us aware of our speaking. Surprising facts about speaking are there. A chain of subtle and intricate activities takes place within moments. The starting is in our brain where the message is conceptualized, and then in the in physiological level, the message travels through the nervous system and finally in the physical level, the message is passed to the articulatory speech organs to produce sounds. In this writing, we shall see how the messages are formed and monitored in a preverbal state and how those messages receive phonological and grammatical encoding following some phonetic plan. Various stages and features of speaking and the role of long and short term memory are also de...

Purpose: This paper aims to review the recent linguistic research carried out with the help of fMRI. Materials and Methods: We performed a comprehensive search on ProQuest and Scopus search engines using keywords: "functional MRI", "fMRI", and "linguistics", "phonetics", "semantics", and their synonyms, yielding to a total of 343 articles. We included 23 articles based on full-text review which conducted original research on different aspects of language processing using fMRI. Studies regarding applied linguistics, as well as studies using subjects with any neuropsychological disorders, were excluded. Results: Included studies were categorized according to the language areas they investigated, including phonetics and phonological processing; semantics; and syntax. The results show that the auditory cortex of both hemispheres is responsible for phonological comprehension of language at the first level, followed by left dominant processing of suprasegmental language in the superior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal cortices and the supplementary motor area. During semantic processing of the language, lexical entry takes place in the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus, while sentential semantic aspects of the language are predominantly processed in the left anterior temporal cortex. The BA 44 area is the major active region during syntax processing. Conclusion: The experimental methods in studying language such as fMRI and other neurolinguistics techniques could provide scientific evidence for proving theoretical assumption. Besides, results of such researches can help other scientific developments such as brain mapping and pre-surgical planning.