British scientists have found a third area of the brain critical to learning language that connects the two main cerebral centers of language in the cortex.
The region is in the parietal lobe of the cortex. Using brain scans, scientists discovered it was connected in a round-about way to language centers called Broca's area and Wernicke's area, named for discoverers Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke. This third area, "Geschwind's territory," is named in honor of American neurologist Norman Geschwind, who pointed out the importance of the region in the 1960s.
"There are clues that the parallel pathway network we found is important for the acquisition of language in childhood," said lead author Dr. Marco Catani of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. "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."
The study appears in the online edition of Annals of Neurology.
© Copyright 2004 by United Press International
