Areas of the brain specialized in language: their location and functions

Brain processes play a very important role in regulating our daily activities. Specifically, there are various areas of the brain that are responsible for organizing language skills and activities that are necessary to communicate.

Three of the most studied areas in relation to language are Broca's Area, Wernicke's Area and the angular gyrus. Below we explain what each one consists of and how the brain and language are related.

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The brain and language

One of the topics that has attracted the most specialists and non-specialists in the neurosciences and cognitive sciences, has been how the human brain regulates linguistic and communicative activity.

Obviously, as it happens in all the activities we carry out, so that language and communication happen brain involvement is necessary. But this participation does not happen without a specific order, it follows a series of patterns depending on the action.

In other words, at the brain level, language is a process that follows a series of patterns whose regulation has been located in different areas. The neurologist Antonio Damasio (cit. by Castaño, 2003) tells us that there are three main systems in charge of this. One of the systems is instrumental (in charge of execution), another is semantic (in charge of coding) and the other is an intermediate system that serves to mediate the previous two.

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Areas of the brain specialized in language

Each of the brain systems that are responsible for regulating language, act through the activity of different brain areas. Three of the most important zones are Broca's Area, Wernicke's Area and the angular gyrus..

1. Drill area

Broca's area is part of the instrumental system of language. The drill area is related to the capacity of order phonemes to create words and then sentences. For this reason, it is also linked to the use of verbs and other words necessary to interact. When this area is damaged, there is also a syntactic difficulty (relative to the order, the combination and the relationship between the words).

It is called Broca's area after the person who started the study of it (Paul Broca) in 1861. What he did was analyze the brain of a person who had had very significant difficulties expressing himself verbally, while his understanding of his language was apparently functional. He found a tumor in a part of the left brain hemisphere, and named the clinical picture as "afemia." From then on, this area of ​​the left cerebral hemisphere is known as Broca's area and is related to disorders in the expressive faculty of verbal language, for example, “Broca's aphasia”.

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2. Wernicke area

Wernicke's area is also part of the instrumental language system. It helps to evoke and vocalize concepts, and is also responsible for processing sounds to combine them creating units capable of having meaning.

It is not directly responsible for regulating semantic activity (giving meaning to linguistic expressions), but for decoding phonemes. However, when there is damage to this brain area, by producing difficulties for discrimination and sound processing, the semantic field is affected.

The regions that make up this area are related to two other brain areas, responsible for regulating motor and premotor activity. Wernicke's area and zones of motor activity are connected through a direct corticocortical pathway, and a corticosubcortical pathway. The first way is the one that regulates associative learning in a more conscious and voluntary dimension; and the second is linked to automatic behaviors such as habits.

This area is located in the left hemisphere of the brain, around the Silvio fissure and next to the bark of insula. It has been studied since the mid-nineteenth century (with which there are several proposals on where it is located) and was named in honor of the neurologist Carl Wernicke.

• Related article: "Wernicke's area: anatomy, functions and disorders"

3. Angular gyrus

The brain is covered by numerous folds or ridges that have very important and not yet fully understood functions. These folds or bumps are called convolutions.

One of the convolutions that participates in the regulation of language is the angular gyrus, also known as the angular gyrus or Broadmann area 39 (AB39). In addition to language, this area participates in the activity of the episodic memory and semantics, in mathematical skills, literacy and spatial attention.

Lesions in this area have been linked to semantic aphasia. Due to its relationship with the comprehensive activity of language and communication, many scientists consider this gyrus to be an extension or a part of Wernicke's Area.

Bibliographic references:

• Castaño, J. (2003). Neurobiological bases of language and its alterations. Journal of Neurology, 36 (8): 781-785.
• Rosselli, M., Ardila, A. & Bernal, B. (2015). Angular gyrus connectivity model in language: meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging. Journal of Neurology, 60: 495-503.
• Trejo-Martínez, D., Jiménez, F., Marcos-Ortega, J., et al. (2007). Anatomical and functional aspects of Broca's area in functional neurosurgery. Medical Journal of the General Hospital of Mexico, 70 (3): 141-149.