CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

The internal architecture of the language network

A set of brain regions on the lateral surfaces of left frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices robustly respond during language comprehension and production. Although we now have strong evidence that this language network is spatially and functionally distinct from brain networks that support other high-level cognitive functions, the internal structure of the language network remains poorly understood. Deciphering the language network’s architecture includes i) identifying its component parts, and ii) understanding the division of labor among those components in space and time. I will first present evidence that all language regions closely track linguistic input. I will then argue that some of the traditional “cuts” that have been proposed in the literature (e.g., based on the size of the linguistic units, based on the distinction between storage and computation, or based on syntactic category) do not seem to be supported by the available evidence. Even aspects of language that have long been argued to preferentially, or selectively, rely on a specific region within the language network (e.g., syntactic processing being localized to parts of Broca¿s area) appear to be distributed across the network. Further, the very same regions that are sensitive to syntactic structure in language show sensitivity to lexical and phonological manipulations. This distributed nature of language processing is in line with much current theorizing in linguistics and the available behavioral psycholinguistic data that show sensitivity to contingencies spanning sound-, word- and phrase-level structure. Time permitting, I will talk about recent work on decoding single word meanings and more complex meanings from the neural activity in the language network, and speculate that the organizing principles of the language network may have to do with meaning.

Relevant readings: https://evlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Fedorenko_et_al_2012_Nplogia.pdfhttps://evlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Blank_et_al_2016.pdf