Speech, Language, Cerebral Dominance and the Aphasias

Abstract

In the preceding sections, we have alluded to various areas in the dominant hemisphere concerned with speech and language. The reader may well have been confused by the introduction of such terms as aphasia, apraxia, agnosia and dyslexia. It is well to warn the student beginning the study of language function that prior to the development of modern neuroimaging this had been an area of much confusion, with much disagreement and multiple hypotheses. This discussion will be limited to the more practical problems of anatomical localization.