Scientists Reaching Consensus On How Brain Processes Speech

Researchers are finding that both human and non-human primate studies have confirmed that speech, one important facet of language, is processed in the brain along two parallel pathways, each of which run from lower- to higher-functioning neural regions. (Credit: iStockphoto/Don Bayley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 27, 2009) — Neuroscientists feel they are much closer to an accepted unified theory about how the brain processes speech and language, according to a scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center who first laid the concepts a decade ago and who has now published a review article confirming the theory.

In the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, the investigator, Josef Rauschecker, PhD, and his co-author, Sophie Scott, PhD, a neuroscientist at University College, London, say that both human and non-human primate studies have confirmed that speech, one important facet of language, is processed in the brain along two parallel pathways, each of which run from lower- to higher-functioning neural regions.

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