The anatomy of language revisited
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Updated: Oct 28, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
1Programa de Morfología, Instituto de Ciencias Biomédicas, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. faboitiz@machi.med.uchile.cl
Abstract:
The language areas have been classically viewed as a posterior, perceptual Wernicke's region connected with an anterior, motor Broca's area via a tract of long fibers denominated the arcuate fasciculus. Recent connectional studies in the monkey indicate that there may be few direct connections between the regions strictly corresponding to Broca's or Wernicke's areas, and that inferior parietal areas may serve as a link between them. The proposed connectional pattern of the language regions fits the network of parietotemporal-prefrontal connections that participate in working memory, a type of memory used in immediate cognitive processing. Supporting this concept, brain activation studies in the human during linguistic working memory tasks have determined a close relation between the supramarginal gyrus (parietal area 40) and Broca's area. We suggest that language processing is closely related to working memory networks, and that the language regions in fact originated in evolution from a working memory network for linguistic utterances.
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