Re: student question: Broca's & Wernicke's Areas

[Tom Allaway]

    I thought it had been pretty well established that the key ingredient for real language was syntax.  ASL has it, and is a true language.  The symboling chimps appear not to have it (although there is still a minority who believe they do).  Pidgins don't have it, creoles do.  Bickerton suggests that "proto-language" (comparable to a pidgin)  was the last stage before syntax emerged.

    There are lots of non-linguistic ways to communicate, but only language has the generativity made possible by syntactic rules.  And that's what you need Broca's area for. ---
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