Significance One of the oldest debates in cognitive neuroscience concerns degree functional specialization present human brain. Prior work has discovered several highly specialized components dedicated to particular mental functions, like face recognition or motion perception. However, our versatility suggests additional existence more general-purpose machinery. Building on prior neuroimaging evidence, along with neurophysiological evidence from non-human primates, we searched for such...

Previous neuroimaging research has identified a number of brain regions sensitive to different aspects linguistic processing, but precise functional characterization these proven challenging. We hypothesize that clearer specificity may emerge if candidate language-sensitive are functionally within each subject individually, method revealed striking in visual cortex rarely been applied studies language. This enables pooling data from corresponding across subjects rather than locations...

Neuroscientists have debated for centuries whether some regions of the human brain are selectively engaged in specific high-level mental functions or whether, instead, cognition is implemented multifunctional regions. For critical case language, conflicting answers arise from neuropsychological literature, which features striking dissociations between deficits linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities, vs. neuroimaging has argued overlap activations processes, including arithmetic, domain...

SummaryIn 1861, Paul Broca stood up before the Anthropological Society of Paris and announced that left frontal lobe was seat speech. Ever since, Broca's eponymous brain region has served as a primary battleground for one central debates in science mind brain: Is human cognition produced by highly specialized regions, each conducting specific mental process, or instead more general-purpose mechanisms, broadly engaged wide range cognitive tasks? For area, debate focuses on specialization...

Humans are thought to have evolved brain regions in the left frontal and temporal cortex that uniquely capable of language processing. However, congenitally blind individuals also activate visual some verbal tasks. We provide evidence this activity fact reflects find individuals, behaves similarly classic regions: (i) BOLD signal is higher during sentence comprehension than linguistically degraded control conditions more difficult; (ii) modulated by phonological information, lexical semantic...

This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark prosodically, and, to extent they do; (2) what are features associated with different aspects structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this from signal? The subject–verb–object sentences was manipulated via preceding those sentences: elements target were either focused (i.e., answer a wh-question) or given mentioned prior discourse);...

Significance Language is a quintessentially human ability. Research has long probed the functional architecture of language in mind and brain using diverse neuroimaging, behavioral, computational modeling approaches. However, adequate neurally-mechanistic accounts how meaning might be extracted from are sorely lacking. Here, we report first step toward addressing this gap by connecting recent artificial neural networks machine learning to recordings during processing. We find that most...

Abstract Prior work decoding linguistic meaning from imaging data has been largely limited to concrete nouns, using similar stimuli for training and testing, a relatively small number of semantic categories. Here we present new approach building brain system in which words sentences are represented as vectors space constructed massive text corpora. By efficiently sampling this select shown subjects, maximize the ability generalize meanings data. To validate approach, train on individual...

The prevalent method in syntax and semantics research involves obtaining a judgement of the acceptability sentence/meaning pair, typically by just author paper, sometimes with feedback from colleagues. This methodology does not allow proper testing scientific hypotheses because (a) small number experimental participants (typically one); (b) stimuli (c) cognitive biases on part researcher participants; (d) effect preceding context (e.g., other constructions may have been recently...

What role does domain-general cognitive control play in understanding linguistic input? Although much evidence has suggested that and working memory resources are sometimes recruited during language comprehension, many aspects of this relationship remain elusive. For example, how frequently do mechanisms get engaged when we understand language? And is engagement necessary for successful comprehension? I here a) review recent brain imaging the neural separability regions support high-level...

The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational events. However, we have no continuous online measure processing with high spatial temporal resolution. Here report just such measure: intracranial recordings from surface human brain show activity, indexed γ-power, increases monotonically over...

What is the relationship between language and other high-level cognitive functions? Neuroimaging studies have begun to illuminate this question, revealing that some brain regions are quite selectively engaged during processing, whereas "multiple-demand" (MD) broadly by diverse tasks. Nonetheless, functional dissociation MD systems remains controversial. Here, we tackle question with a synergistic combination of MRI methods: first define candidate language-specific in each subject...

During linguistic processing, a set of brain regions on the lateral surfaces left frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices exhibit robust responses. These areas display highly correlated activity while subject rests or performs naturalistic language comprehension task, suggesting that they form an integrated functional system. Evidence suggests this system is spatially functionally distinct from other systems support high-level cognition in humans. Yet, how different within might be...

Aside from the language-selective left-lateralized frontotemporal network, language comprehension sometimes recruits a domain-general bilateral frontoparietal network implicated in executive functions: multiple demand (MD) network. However, nature of MD network's contributions to remains debated. To illuminate role this processing humans, we conducted large-scale fMRI investigation using data 30 diverse word and sentence experiments (481 unique participants [female male], 678 scanning...