The language system and its place within the broader architecture of the human mind and brain
Although many animal species have the ability to generate complex thoughts, only humans can
share such thoughts with one another, via language. My research aims to understand i) the system
that supports our linguistic abilities, including its neural implementation, and ii) its interfaces with
the rest of the human cognitive arsenal.
I will begin by introducing the “language network”, a set of interconnected brain regions that
support language comprehension and production. With a focus on the subset of this network
dedicated to high-level linguistic processing, I will then consider two questions. First, what is the
internal structure of the language network? In particular, do different brain regions preferentially
process different levels of linguistic structure (e.g., sound structure vs. syntactic/semantic
compositional structure)? And second, how does the language network interact with other largescale networks in the human brain, like the domain-general cognitive control network or the
network that supports social cognition? To tackle these questions, I use behavioral, fMRI, and
genotyping methods in healthy adults, as well as intracranial recordings from the cortical surfaces in
humans undergoing presurgical mapping (ECoG), and studies of patients with brain damage.
I will argue that: i) Linguistic representations are distributed across the language network, with no
evidence for segregation of distinct kinds of linguistic information (i.e., phonological, lexical, and
combinatorial - syntactic/semantic - information) in distinct regions of the network. Even aspects of
language that have long been argued to preferentially rely on a specific region within the language
network (e.g., syntactic processing being localized to parts of Broca’s area) turn out to be distributed
across the network when measured with sufficiently sensitive tools. Further, the very same regions
that are sensitive to high-level (e.g., syntactic) structure in language show sensitivity to lower-level
(e.g., phonotactic) regularities. This picture is in line with much current theorizing in linguistics and
the available behavioral psycholinguistic data that shows sensitivity to contingencies spanning
sound-, word- and phrase-level structure. And: ii) The language network necessarily interacts with
other large-scale networks, including prominently the domain-general cognitive control system.
Nevertheless, the two systems appear to be functionally distinct given a) the differences in their
functional response profiles (selective responses to language vs. responses to difficulty across a
broad range of tasks), and b) distinct patterns of functional correlations. My ongoing work aims to
characterize the computations performed by these systems - and other systems supporting highlevel cognitive abilities - in order to understand the division of labor among them during language
comprehension and production.