Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area (original) (raw)

Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445 ; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt ) document the spatial and temporal pattern of neuronal populations within Broca's area as patients thought of a single word, changed its tense (for verbs) or number (for nouns), and articulated the word silently. For these three stages, they detected activity at 200, 320, and 450 milliseconds, moving in a caudal to rostral direction. These data fit neatly within the roughly 600 milliseconds required for the onset of speech and map the distinct neural computations within an area of the brain, known for almost a century and a half, as important for the production of language.

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