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Welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown ASL podcast. I'm your host, Lori Mallory. Today, we're going to talk about how language is processed inside your brain.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders – NIDCD – is one of the National Institutes of Health. It funded new research about how people learn to communicate and the findings are important. They found out that how we learn to understand gestures happens in the same region of the brain as how we learn to understand words. The results of the research study are published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences".

For a long time, we have known which regions of the brain are responsible for understanding spoken or written words. Now research shows that the same regions are important for understanding wordless gestures. The brain regions may be much more important for interpreting symbols than researchers used to think and could be the origin of language in humans.

The director of the NIDCD, Dr. James Battey, Jr., said, "In babies, the ability to communicate through gestures precedes spoken language, and you can predict a child's language skills based on the repertoire of his or her gestures during those early months." He went on to say, "These findings not only provide compelling evidence regarding where language may have come from, they help explain the interplay that exists between language and gesture as children develop their language skills."

Scientists have known that sign language and spoken language are largely processed in the same regions of the brain. It isn't surprising that signed and spoken languages activate the same brain regions, because sign language operates in the same way as spoken language does with its own vocabulary and rules of grammar.

In this study, the researchers wanted to find out if non-language-related gestures are processed in the same regions of the brain as language is. Non-language-related gestures are hand and body movements that convey meaning, but are not part of a formal language. There were two types of gestures that were explored in the study. One was "pantomimes", that imitate actions like unscrewing a jar or juggling balls. The other was "emblems", which are more abstract. That includes things like a hand sweeping across the forehead to indicate "it's hot in here!" or a finger to the lips to signify "be quiet." The researchers found that for both gesture and spoken language stimuli they used, the brain was highly activated in the language regions of the brain.

The current understanding of language says it is similar to smart Web search engines, like Google. Google searches the Web and shows the best match at the top of the list. Researchers believe that one part of the brain serves as a storehouse of words and another region of the brain selects the most appropriate match. They suggest that the regions of the brain don’t simply decipher words, but may also be able to apply meaning to any incoming symbols, no matter if they are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects.

For more information about NIDCD programs, see the Web site at www.nidcd.nih.gov.

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The Disability Law Lowdown is sponsored by the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers (DBTAC) a network of ten ADA Centers around the country. The ADA Centers provide training and technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability related laws.

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