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Figure 9.13 Drawing of Brain Showing Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas
For most people the left hemisphere is specialized for language. Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is involved in
language production, whereasWernicke’s area, near the auditory cortex, is specialized for language
comprehension.
Evidence for the importance of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in language is seen in patients who
experience aphasia, a condition in which language functions are severely impaired. People with
Broca’s aphasia have difficulty producing speech, whereas people with damage to Wernicke’s
area can produce speech, but what they say makes no sense and they have trouble understanding
language.
Learning Language
Language learning begins even before birth, because the fetus can hear muffled versions of
speaking from outside the womb. Moon, Cooper, and Fifer (1993) [7]found that infants only two
days old sucked harder on a pacifier when they heard their mothers’ native language being
spoken than when they heard a foreign language, even when strangers were speaking the