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Broca's area

File:Broca’s_area_-_BA44_and_BA45.png · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Broca's area

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region of the brain in the frontal lobe - in the dominant hemisphere - that aids speech production

Key facts

Part of
Frontal lobe
Artery
Middle cerebral
Vein
Superior sagittal sinus
Mesh
D065711

via Wikipedia infobox

Research

2,773 papers

via PubMed

~25 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Broca's area, or the Broca area (/ˈbroʊkə/, also UK: /ˈbrɒkə/, US: /ˈbroʊkɑː/), is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the brain with functions linked to speech production.

Language processing has been linked to Broca's area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis) (BA45) of the brain. Since then, the approximate region he identified has become known as Broca's area, and the deficit in language production as Broca's aphasia, also called expressive aphasia. Broca's area is now typically defined in terms of the pars opercularis and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, represented in Brodmann's cytoarchitectonic map as Brodmann area 44 and Brodmann area 45 of the dominant hemisphere.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Broca's area” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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