The DOI matches its Crossref record; 95 of the 95 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Broca's Area in Language, Action, and Music
Abstract
The work of Paul Broca has been of pivotal importance in the localization of some higher cognitive brain functions. He first reported that lesions to the caudal part of the inferior frontal gyrus were associated with expressive deficits. Although most of his claims are still true today, the emergence of novel techniques as well as the use of comparative analyses prompts modern research for a revision of the role played by Broca's area. Here we review current research showing that the inferior frontal gyrus and the ventral premotor cortex are activated for tasks other than language production. Specifically, a growing number of studies report the involvement of these two regions in language comprehension, action execution and observation, and music execution and listening. Recently, the critical involvement of the same areas in representing abstract hierarchical structures has also been demonstrated. Indeed, language, action, and music share a common syntactic-like structure. We propose that these areas are tuned to detect and represent complex hierarchical dependencies, regardless of modality and use. We speculate that this capacity evolved from motor and premotor functions associated with action execution and understanding, such as those characterizing the mirror-neuron system.
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“However, the neuroimaging claims are based largely on observations of activation for a nonlanguage task in or near a general brain region previously implicated in language (e.g., Broca's area), without a direct demonstration of overlap of linguistic and nonlinguistic activations in the same subjects.”
From Functional specificity for high-level linguistic processing in the human brain (2011) · cites this paper as [16]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Fadiga, L., Craighero, L., & D’Ausilio, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Ferrara (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Fadiga, Luciano
- Venue
- Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2009-07
- Volume
- 1169
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 448-458
- ISSN
- 0077-8923 (ISSN-L)
- 1749-6632
- OpenAlex
- W2104302934
- Cited by
- 332
- References
- 95
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 28
- FWCI
- 1.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Institutional Research Information System University of Ferrara (University of Ferrara) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Keywords
- Broca's area, inferior frontal gyrus, ventral premotor cortex, language production, language comprehension, action observation, action execution, music processing, mirror neuron system, language evolution
- MeSH terms
- Frontal Lobe, Humans, Language, Motor Skills, Music
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