I was interviewed by Ken Barrett last week for an episode of his Brainland podcast:
https://shows.acast.com/brainland/episodes/speak-on-the-neuroscience-of-language
We discussed several topics that came up in my textbook, starting with a brief historical look at the contributions of Broca and Wernicke, through to modern functional brain imaging.
One of the topics that we returned to a few times is the extent to which language is lateralized. I find this a really interesting question generally, and that people often over-simplify the answer. One the one hand, the left hemisphere clearly plays a special role—people who suffer damage to the left hemisphere can get aphasia, whereas the same type of challenges are not seen with right hemisphere damage. However, damage to the right hemisphere certainly affects communication, and functional brain measures show lots of activity in the right hemisphere, both mirroring what we see in the left (acoustic, phonological, lexical information) and more unique (prosody). Both of these sources of information are important to consider.
[And a side note—I find myself rolling my eyes (at myself) every time I say “left” hemisphere instead of “dominant” hemisphere. But also it gets too confusing to explain all the time!]
If you have a chance to listen to the episode I hope you find it useful and it raises at least one interesting question for you.