ABSTRACT
Early in the 19th century, the notion that a mental faculty could be localized to a particular region of the brain was associated with the palpation of the scalps of Victorian men and women in their parlors—hardly the basis for serious scientific pursuits. Reports of selective language impairments following frontal lobe damage (consistent with the phrenologists’ localization of language) were largely ignored. But resistance to localism in the scientific community was waning in 1861, when Paul Broca first described the case of Leborgne, rendered speech-less (except for the recurrent use of the syllable “tan”) by a condition that Broca subsequently attributed to progressive softening of “the middle part of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere” (1861a: 237). Following Broca’s reports, and for much of the twentieth century, lesions to the left frontal operculum were linked to a constellation of linguistic deficits affecting the production of words and sentences and the comprehension of certain syntactic structures (i.e., Broca’s aphasia). In his argument for a functionally distinct system for articulated language, Broca also laid the foundations for modern cognitive neuropsychology, when he proposed that the independence of a cognitive faculty can be investigated by the careful functional analysis of impaired and spared deficits and by the precise description, “by name and by row [of] the affected convolutions and the degree of alteration of each” (p. 340). Thus, we see in 1861 both a delineation of the general approach of lesion-deficit analyses of the functional independence of cognitive processes and the specific description of the seat of a “language organ.”
