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Pandora’s Box

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Abstract

This chapter overviews the neurological underpinnings of language and speech. It starts with a historical perspective of neuroscience, highlighting Paul Broca’s seminal discovery of a localized brain region controlling articulated speech. The history of behavioral neurology in the twentieth century is reviewed in some detail, to end with the more modern approaches to neurolinguistic research, including the techniques of brain imaging and network processing. These new approaches have provided an updated model for the organization of the language-related circuit, which is depicted as separated in a dorsal pathway involved in syntax and articulatory processes, and a ventral pathway involved in semantic and lexical processing. This scheme will be the basis for discussions in later chapters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Medical School, and Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Francisco Aboitiz

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  1. Francisco Aboitiz
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Aboitiz, F. (2017). Pandora’s Box. In: A Brain for Speech. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54060-7_2

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