Monkey Broca, Wernicke?

[Daniel Everett]

Tom's posting is a very useful one. Too many strange claims are  
floating about that require a degree of cortical localization. But  
any rigid specialization proposed is almost certainly premature at  
this point.

A couple of sources are:

Pulvermüller, Friedman. (2002). The neuroscience of language: on  
brain circuits of words and serial order. Cambridge: Cambridge  
University Press.

Brook, Andrew and Kathleen Akins, eds. 2005. Cognition and the Brain:  
The philosophy and neuroscience movement. Cambridge: Cambridge  
University Press.

Dan


On 26 Jul 2006, at 13:49, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> Neuroscience advances somewhat fitfully. For every announced new  
> discovery,  there is sooner or later (more often sooner) a finding  
> pointing in another direction. This is because of the complexity &  
> distributiveness of most higher cognitive system. Another  
> instasnce, I suppose, of the three blind men describing the  
> elephant. So first, we need to be cautious about evaluating  
> 'radical new discoveries', particularly about language (which is  
> the most complex & distributive capacity supported by the brain).
>
> More to the point, the function-specific regions ("modules") of the  
> cortex  ('periphery') are all  mamalian evolutionary projections  
> from the *limbic-thalamic sub-cortex*. This is true of vision,  
> audition, motor control, somatic-sensory areas, attention, episodic  
> & semantic memories, etc. And for most of those 'higher' cortical  
> capacities, the limbic-thalamic areas remain part of the functional  
> system--in a a *distributive network* (see e.g. M-M. Mesulam's   
> "Principles of Behavioral & Cognitive Neurology", 2nd edition,   
> Oxford U. Press, 2000 as a major source on this. But there is a  
> vast  lit. on the subject).
>
> Thus, because so many of the cognitive capacities that support  
> human language are  the outgrowth of (functionally amenable) pre- 
> linguistic capacities, the limbic-thalamic areas are implicated in  
> almost all brain-activity related to language processing. And the  
> pre-human primate brain is so close to ours in its general  
> architecture, there's no reason to assume that the same core- 
> periphery relation doesn't apply there.
>
> So if at one time research implicates a cortical area  
> ('periphery')  and at another a sub-cortical one ('core') in  
> executing the same function, be it linguistic or pre-linguistic, it  
> is because* both* are implicated. Keep on truckin'.  TG
>
> =======================

*********************
Daniel L. Everett
Outgoing (as of August 2006) Profesor of Phonetics and Phonology
School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK M13 9PL
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/DEHome.html
----------
Incoming Chairperson
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
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Illinois State University
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phone: (309) 438-3604
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