A paper by Yale School of Medicine researchers provides evidence that typical and atypical language lateralization is reflected throughout the functional architecture of the human brain.
The paper, published in Nature Communications, reveals that nearly 1 in 10 people in the general population possess an atypical, right lateralized, language system. Individuals with atypical language organization exhibit corresponding hemispheric differences in functional organization that are evident throughout the brain’s information processing hierarchy. Follow-up twin-based heritability analyses indicate that both language lateralization and the broader features of functional brain organization are, in part, driven by genetics.
This work advances understanding of the relationship between the localized hemispheric specialization of specific behaviors, like language, and the broad functional organizational properties of the human brain.
The study of the relationship between language lateralization and functional network organization could shed light on the biological rules that support sophisticated cognition in humans as well as psychiatric and neurological illnesses with known alterations in brain laterality.
“Asymmetries shape life everywhere around us,” said Loïc Labache, PhD, postdoctoral associate in the Yale Department of Psychiatry and the paper’s first author. “Knowing that the lateralization of language, the most studied brain function since the early days of psychology, is not isolated but impacts the entire brain organization is an amazing step forward in the understanding of the role of brain asymmetries.”
Labache works in the lab of Avram Holmes, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and the paper’s senior author.