Is only the left hemisphere responsible for language?
It has been believed that the left hemisphere is specialized in language in the brain since Broca (1861) and Wernicke (1874) presented specific language disorder, aphasia. Current research, however, has shown that the right hemisphere also contributes to language processing in different aspects from the left hemisphere, called prosody (emotional language) (Ross, 1981). Those who have a lesion in the right hemisphere show a disorder of production and comprehension of emotional language, such as humor, sarcastic, happy or sad tones without the disturbance of speech production and comprehension. It is called aprosodia . The clinical evidence of aphasia and aprosody support the notion that language is a unity of linguistic and emotional aspects. It also indicates that the integration of the left and right hemispheres is necessary to understand mechanisms of language processing.
