Review Article
Year: 2019 | Month: January | Volume: 9 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 256-269
Neurobiology of Language Development: An Update
Vikas Kumar1, Joydeep Das2, Madhumita Bhattacharya3
1Clinical Psychologist, Sri Sri University, Cuttack, Odisha.
2PhD. Scholar, Dept. of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Psychiatry, Kanke, Ranchi, Jharkhand.
3Assistant Professor, Dept. of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Psychiatry, Kanke, Ranchi, Jharkhand.
Corresponding Author: Vikas Kumar
ABSTRACT
Language is a human’s ability to use an extremely rich set of symbols, plus rule for combining them to communicate information. The concept of the emerging field of neurobiology of language is that foremost study of the human brain, i.e., it is a subfield of neuroscience and particular in human neuroscience. By saying this, we mean to distinguish this from this related field psychology and linguistics, in which the emphases of investigation are certainly to understanding the brain but are not ispo facto focused on the understanding of neural mechanism. The human brain has multiple anatomical specializations that may be relevant to explaining our capacity for language. First, human brains have wider cortical minicolumns in both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas compared with great apes. Second, human brains exhibit leftward asymmetries in Broca’s area volume and in the width of planum temporal minicolumns that are not found in great apes. Third, the projections of the human arcuate fasciculus reach beyond Wernicke’s area to a region of expanded association cortex in the middle and inferior temporal cortex that appears to be involved in processing word meaning.
Key words: Language Development, Neurobiology of Language, Broca’s areas, Wernicke’s areas, and psychiatric disorders.