Broca's area: From speech to music

Abstract

Since 1861. Broca's area was considered as an anatomic region of brain endued for speech articulation. It is believed that it is responsible for controlling motor speech movements and related movements of the lips, tongue, larynx and pharynx. Broca's area has a primary role in speech motor programming, as well as in the phonetic, phonological, syntactic and semantic aspects of language, but it is also considered as a cortical region underling the aquisition of grammatical rules. In addition to the production process, Broca's area is involved in the process of understanding a language, as well as in achievement of other language functions. However, there are various controversies about the connection between Broca's area and language functions. The lesions of this area do not always lead to Broca's aphasia, and in addition, patients with Broca's aphasia do not always have a lesion of Broca's area. Also, it was found that some of language functions, that were earlier considered to be controlled only by the activity of Broca's area, are realized through the interaction of this area with other areas of the cortex, and activated by certain subcortical areas. Although a number of studies showed the activation of Broca's area during the performance of language tasks, there are studies that have shown that this area is also activate during non-linguistic tasks. Thus, this area has a certain role in imitation of the movement, capturing, manipulating objects, working memory, recognizing familiar smells, music and other cognitive functions. Therefore, recent studies, researching the role of Broca's area in language acquisition, raise the question of redefining the basic functions that have been attributed to Broca's area.