Asymmetric Broca's area in great apes.
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.
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Division of Psychobiology and Living Links Center, Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA. lrcbh@rmy.emory.edu
Hopkins
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D000818:Animals; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology; D006071:Gorilla gorilla / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D015186:Hominidae / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D019974:Pan paniscus / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D013045:Species Specificity; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology; D014828:Vocalization, Animal / Q000502:physiology