This publication comes from another in a series of symposia fostered by the Ciba Foundation. This particular gathering took place in May of 1963 with Dr. Macdonald Critchley as Chairman.
This discussion brought together workers in the fields of neurology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, psychiatry, and engineering with attention both to the faculty of speech in health and to the pathology of speech. The various contributors to this Symposium expressed their viewpoints as to how language is perceived, organized, transmitted, and understood. It was generally agreed that, at present and despite many decades of work, there is no satisfactory classification of language disorders. The basic anatomical dichotomy is the temporal lobe, sensory disorders versus the frontal lobe, motor disturbances. The temporal lobe is more concerned with decoding of signals, while the frontal lobe deals more with encoding.
Language is the basis of communication, but it is also the expression of an