Short video segment from “The Secret Life of the Brain”, Vol. 2, David Grubin Productions In Association With Thirteen WNET New York. Available in CSEL and TVI Libraries.
For most people, whether they are left or right-handed, language abilities are sited in the brain's left hemisphere. Interestingly, researchers have found that people who learn a second language after early childhood tend to process the second language in the right hemisphere. Generally,though, the right hemisphere handles less analytical, more intuitive abilities, such as flights of imagination, artistic or musical awareness, and psychological insight. In spite of this distribution, if one hemisphere is injured, the other can reorganize to take over the opposite-hemisphere tasks, depending on the age at injury.