Speech and Language

Abstract

Abstract Human communication occurs through verbal and nonverbal mechanisms. Nonverbal modalities include sign language, pictures, symbols, gestures, facial expressions, actions, and body positions. This chapter focuses on verbal communications, expressed through speech and language. Verbal communication involves letter symbols, words, phrases, and sentences, put together so that grammatical rules of structure, or syntax, will allow meaningful communications, or semantics, to occur. There are both semantic and motoric (expressive) components to language. The semantic content of language refers to its ability to convey meaning. The motoric aspects of language include the proper articulation and assembly (according to rules of grammar) of the building blocks of words (phonemes and morphemes), facial and gestural (e.g., sign language) expressions, and writing. The left frontal lobe (see Figure 4-1) is particularly important for the motoric aspects of language, whereas the left temporal area is vital to the semantic aspects. The prefrontal cerebral cortex has also recently been hypothesized to play some role in semantic processing of language. As discussed further in this chapter, left frontal injury is associated with Broca’s aphasia, and left temporal injury is associated with Wernicke’s aphasia. Over and above its grammatical, semantic, prosodic, and phonologic components, pragmatics is the aspect of language concerned with its overall communicative value. Whereas the dominant hemisphere (typically left) controls most aspects of language, the right side contributes to its communicative value. According to Cutting, the right hemisphere plays an important role in allowing a person to use metaphor and grasp the meaning of abstract verbal communications (see Abstraction and Conceptualization, in Chapter 6). This is an example of the right hemisphere’s integrative functions, necessary to appreciating the “whole” picture and the implied meanings that underlie the overt content of communications (see Chapter 1, under The Interview as a Means To Elicit Information, content vs. process).