Pierre Paul Broca was a physician who specialized in language. He became interested in Louis Leborgne, a man who couldn’t speak. After his death, Broca found the lesion on his brain which he deduced was the cause of Leborgne’s disability. This frontal lobe are became known as Broca’s area.
During the beginning of the 19th century, Localism, a notion that a mental faculty could be localized to a particular region of the brain, was still very popular. But in 1861, Paul Broca described the case of the speechless problem of Leborgne and associated it to progressive softening of “the middle part of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere”. 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.
