Sunday, September 18, 2011

Speaking and Listening Share Large Part of Brain Infrastructure

ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2011) — What areas of the brain are involved in the linguistic processes underlying speech and listening and are there large differences between these? Neuroscientists from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen are the first to have successfully investigated this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In what may come as a surprise to many scientists, the researchers have established that there is a large degree of overlap between the areas involved.
The results are published in the journal Psychological Science.
Within the scientific community there is a lot of discussion about whether the brain functions involved in speech production are also involved in the comprehension of speech. In the area of mirror neuron research in particular (a hot topic for the past 15 years), research has viewed the overlap between the areas of the brain involved in speech and listening as reaction and observed action, says neuroscientist Laura Menenti, who is currently working at the University of Glasgow. However, speaking and listening are more than just action and observation. They also involve linguistic processing. Menenti and her colleagues mainly focused on this last aspect:..... http://bit.ly/nXC6tn

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