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      Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension

      research-article
      a , b , * , 1 , a , c , f , d , e
      Cognition
      Elsevier
      Language, Neurobiology, Context

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          Abstract

          Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is derived from lab-based experiments that are far removed from everyday language use, and that are inspired by questions originating in linguistic and psycholinguistic contexts. In this paper we argue that in order to make progress, the field needs to shift its focus to understanding the neurobiology of naturalistic language comprehension. We present here a new conceptual framework for understanding the neurobiological organization of language comprehension. This framework is non-language-centered in the computational/neurobiological constructs it identifies, and focuses strongly on context. Our core arguments address three general issues: (i) the difficulty in extending language-centric explanations to discourse; (ii) the necessity of taking context as a serious topic of study, modeling it formally and acknowledging the limitations on external validity when studying language comprehension outside context; and (iii) the tenuous status of the language network as an explanatory construct. We argue that adopting this framework means that neurobiological studies of language will be less focused on identifying correlations between brain activity patterns and mechanisms postulated by psycholinguistic theories. Instead, they will be less self-referential and increasingly more inclined towards integration of language with other cognitive systems, ultimately doing more justice to the neurobiological organization of language and how it supports language as it is used in everyday life.

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          Most cited references198

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          The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain?

          This article reviews a free-energy formulation that advances Helmholtz's agenda to find principles of brain function based on conservation laws and neuronal energy. It rests on advances in statistical physics, theoretical biology and machine learning to explain a remarkable range of facts about brain structure and function. We could have just scratched the surface of what this formulation offers; for example, it is becoming clear that the Bayesian brain is just one facet of the free-energy principle and that perception is an inevitable consequence of active exchange with the environment. Furthermore, one can see easily how constructs like memory, attention, value, reinforcement and salience might disclose their simple relationships within this framework.
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            Meta-analyzing left hemisphere language areas: phonology, semantics, and sentence processing.

            The advent of functional neuroimaging has allowed tremendous advances in our understanding of brain-language relationships, in addition to generating substantial empirical data on this subject in the form of thousands of activation peak coordinates reported in a decade of language studies. We performed a large-scale meta-analysis of this literature, aimed at defining the composition of the phonological, semantic, and sentence processing networks in the frontal, temporal, and inferior parietal regions of the left cerebral hemisphere. For each of these language components, activation peaks issued from relevant component-specific contrasts were submitted to a spatial clustering algorithm, which gathered activation peaks on the basis of their relative distance in the MNI space. From a sample of 730 activation peaks extracted from 129 scientific reports selected among 260, we isolated 30 activation clusters, defining the functional fields constituting three distributed networks of frontal and temporal areas and revealing the functional organization of the left hemisphere for language. The functional role of each activation cluster is discussed based on the nature of the tasks in which it was involved. This meta-analysis sheds light on several contemporary issues, notably on the fine-scale functional architecture of the inferior frontal gyrus for phonological and semantic processing, the evidence for an elementary audio-motor loop involved in both comprehension and production of syllables including the primary auditory areas and the motor mouth area, evidence of areas of overlap between phonological and semantic processing, in particular at the location of the selective human voice area that was the seat of partial overlap of the three language components, the evidence of a cortical area in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus dedicated to syntactic processing and in the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus a region selectively activated by sentence and text processing, and the hypothesis that different working memory perception-actions loops are identifiable for the different language components. These results argue for large-scale architecture networks rather than modular organization of language in the left hemisphere.
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              An integrated theory of language production and comprehension.

              Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation (such as semantics, syntax, and phonology). We show (a) how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, (b) how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and (c) how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Cognition
                Cognition
                Cognition
                Elsevier
                0010-0277
                1873-7838
                1 November 2018
                November 2018
                : 180
                : 135-157
                Affiliations
                [a ]Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, The University of Trento, Trento, Italy
                [b ]Center for Practical Wisdom, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
                [c ]Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy
                [d ]Centre for Language Studies & Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
                [e ]Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
                [f ]NeuroMI - Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milano, Italy
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. uri.hasson@ 123456unitn.it
                [1]

                This research was supported by European Research Council Starting Grant ERC-STG #263318 NeuroInt to UH, a Fondazione Cariplo-Regione Lombardia grant to MM (grant number 2017-1633), and a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Vidi grant to RW (grant number 276-89-007). UH’s work was conducted in part while serving at and with support of the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

                Article
                S0010-0277(18)30170-7
                10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.018
                6145924
                30053570
                47db6871-16be-4861-b20e-1ce230241118

                This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

                History
                : 8 June 2017
                : 5 June 2018
                : 24 June 2018
                Categories
                Article

                Neurosciences
                language,neurobiology,context
                Neurosciences
                language, neurobiology, context

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