They already have experience with language, and their brain can sometimes fill in the gap with words they don't always hear.
Mary Lou Jepsen of Google believes we can better understand brain disease, and brain functions like language learning, if we can massively increase the resolution of brain scans.
All of the brain regions involved in processing language fired up as if the brain were healthy and normal.
More recent work has shown that the formation of microgyria throws the pattern of neural connections between the language centres and the rest of the brain into confusion.
It taps into emotional brain centres and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.
Samuels, director of neuroscience critical care at Emory University in Atlanta, said portions of the left brain control speech and understanding language.
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For around 90 minutes each day, the electrodes were also stimulated to map the structure of the brain so as to identify language centres and other vulnerable areas.
Tracy Mobley can have good days, when she shows no symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, which affects the areas of the brain associated with personality, behavior and language.
Dementia is a loss of brain function and affects memory, thinking, language, judgment and behavior.
Osofsky-McGonigle had aphasia, a common outcome of stroke in which parts of the brain related to language, including reading, writing and talking, are damaged.
The language centres of the brain, known as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, after the 19th-century researchers who discovered them, are part of the cerebral cortex on the left-hand side of the organ.
Research suggests some connection between low numbers of synapses in a person's brain and Alzheimer's symptoms such as memory impairment and language deterioration.
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If you treat it like a language, as Wooten suggests, you might learn new skills and reap some of the brain health benefits that neurologists are exploring.
But the reality is that many parts of the brain work together to produce speech and no single gene, region of the brain or theory can explain successful language-learning.
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Hawkins, who will continue to work as chief technical officer of Treo maker palmOne (nasdaq: PLMO - news - people ), already has his own research lab to study the neocortex, a massive part of the brain thought to hold such higher level functions as language, learning, memory and complex thought.
This means that the left hemisphere (language based) and right hemisphere (seat of emotions and non-verbal awareness) of the brain more neural communication, which is why most women may be better able to verbalize emotions (in general) than most men.
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For instance, an injury to the left hemisphere of the brain, which in 95% of people controls the capacity to understand and generate language, doesn't necessarily mean the patient can never have a conversation again.
Dr Studdert-Kennedy maintains that speech moves in a fluid stream of sound that has little resemblance to the discrete tones used in Dr Merzenich's hearing tests, and that dyslexia probably stems from a high-level problem in the brain's language system that is simply not yet understood.
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