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Subject:
From:
Meir Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
St. John's University Cerebral Palsy List
Date:
Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:26:58 -0500
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Health - HealthDay


Third Language Area in Brain Identified

Mon Dec 13,11:47 PM ET Health - HealthDay


MONDAY, Dec. 13 (HealthDayNews) -- British scientists say they've
identified a third area of the brain involved in language, a finding
that seems to confirm previous theories.
Yahoo! Health
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Find answers here.





Until now, it was believed that just two brain areas handled language.
One area produced language, another area was responsible for
comprehension, and a dense bundle of nerve fibers linked the two areas.
However, some scientists suspected there was a third language area in
the brain. In this study, researchers used diffusion tensor magnetic
resonance imaging -- a more powerful version of standard MRI -- to
identify this third area, which they dubbed Geschwind's territory.
The name honors American neurologist Norman Geschwind, who championed
the idea of a third linguistic area decades ago.
The study appears in the current online edition of the Annals of
Neurology.
"We were surprised that the two classical areas were densely connected
to a third area, whose presence had already been suspected but whose
connections with the classical network were unknown," study author Dr.
Marco Catani, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London,
said in a prepared statement.
Geschwind's territory is a separate, roundabout route that connects the
two classical areas, known as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, via a region
of the parietal lobe of the cortex, the researchers said.
"There are clues that the parallel pathway network we found is important
for the acquisition of language in childhood," Catani said.
"Geschwind's territory is the last area in the brain to mature, the
completion of its maturation coinciding with the development of reading
and writing skills. An important future line of study will be to examine
the maturation of this area and its connections in the context of autism
and dyslexia," Catani said.
More information
The U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication
Disorders has more about language development.
(http://tinyurl.com/6xffq)

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