NASET News Alert

How the Brain Controls Our Speech

June 18, 2020

Speaking requires both sides of the brain. Each hemisphere takes over a part of the complex task of forming sounds, modulating the voice and monitoring what has been said. However, the distribution of tasks is different than has been thought up to now, as an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists and phoneticians at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics Berlin has discovered: it is not just the right hemisphere that analyses how we speak -- the left hemisphere also plays a role. Until now, it has been assumed that the spoken word arises in left side of the brain and is analyzed by the right side. According to accepted doctrine, this means that when we learn to speak English and for example practice the sound equivalent to "th," the left side of the brain controls the motor function of the articulators like the tongue, while the right side analyses whether the produced sound actually sounds as we intended. Read More