The Hole in Her Head
Steve Dodson,
Languagehat,
Sept 09, 2022
The full NY Times article (archived) is behind a paywall, but Steve Dodson performs a service by quoting it at length and offering comments. The gist is that while the person in question was missing parts of her brain corresponding to Broca's area, widely considered essential to the development of language, she was nonetheless able to speak and read, as these skills developed in other parts of her brain. "The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my professional passions," she writes. The story supports the idea that "language in the brain is distributed throughout the entire brain," and not located in one place.
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