Asymmetric Broca's area in great apes.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 11734839.
- Also identified by PMC identifier PMC2080764.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Brodmann's area 44 delineates part of Broca's area within the inferior frontal gyrus of the human brain and is a critical region for speech production, being larger in the left hemisphere than in the right - an asymmetry that has been correlated with language dominance. Here we show that there is a similar asymmetry in this area, also with left-hemisphere dominance, in three great ape species (Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus and Gorilla gorilla). Our findings suggest that the neuroanatomical substrates for left-hemisphere dominance in speech production were evident at least five million years ago and are not unique to hominid evolution.