These are Broca’s area, tasked with directing the processes that lead to speech utterance, and Wernicke’s area, whose main role is to “decode” speech. that it is “referential,” meaning that “speakers use it to exchange specific information with each other about people or objects and their locations or actions”īut where, exactly, is language located in the brain? Research has identified two primary “language centers,” which are both located on the left side of the brain.that it is “compositional,” meaning that it “allows speakers to express thoughts in sentences comprising subjects, verbs, and objects”.Pagel adds, human language has two distinctive characteristics. While other animals do have their own codes for communication - to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food - such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences.īy contrast, Prof. Mark Pagel, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, explains in a “question and answer” feature for BMC Biology, human language is quite a unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom. When did spoken language first emerge as a tool of communication, and how is it different from the way in which other animals communicate?Īs Prof.

Spotlife affect of brain