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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2025
Edited by Kristel Doreleijers, Remco Knooihuizen and Eva van Lier
[Nota Bene 2:2] 2025
► pp. 304–323

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Language and the brain

Broca and Wernicke in context

 | University of Amsterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Amsterdam.

Published online: 31 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nb.00035.elf
Abstract
This article discusses some aspects of the historical and contemporaneous context of the 19th-century discovery of language centers in the human brain by the neurologists Broca and Wernicke. The first part deals with (1) earlier theorizing about the bodily locus of mental faculties and about the nature of aphasic disorders, and (2) the 19th-century emergence of research facilities in large hospitals. Together, these developments enabled successful aphasia-based search for language centers. Its main result, the Broca-Wernicke model, soon acquired benchmark status, but was never uncontroversial.
The article’s second part discusses the remarkable disconnectedness of 19th-century neurology/aphasiology and 19th-century linguistics. In recent historiography, several plausible factors have been mentioned to explain this regrettable lack of contact. The suggestion that the neurologists’ neglect of syntax could have been prevented by a rapprochement with contemporaneous linguistics has to be rejected, however.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Precursors and contemporaries
    • 2.1Necessary conditions
      • 2.1.1Language center(s) in the cortex
      • 2.1.2Aphasia as language disorder
      • 2.1.3Hospitals as research centers
    • 2.2Contemporary context
  • 3.Relations between neurology and linguistics?
  • 4.Conclusion and look ahead
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (29)
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