Prosody provides cues to morphosyntactic structure: an EEG-fMRI study of neural networks subserving Swedish word tone processing (2025)

Welcome to the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. A meeting like this finds its raison d'être in the conviction that science is not only about having ideas, but also about communicating them. Our Society is an important vehicle for the communication of ideas, insights, and findings related to the neurobiological infrastructure for human language. One of the great challenges for science in the 21st century is to understand how the microcosm of the human brain enables the key cognitive capacities that we command. Understanding how the brain gives rise to language is central in this endeavour. Our annual meeting brings together researchers that share this common goal, and it is encouraging that every year more researchers are joining this important endeavour. Our Society continues to grow. This year there were more submissions than ever before. The increasing number of members of our Society and the ever larger numbers of participants at our annual meeting has influenced the organization of our Society and our annual meeting. The website (www.neurolang.org) and the monthly newsletter have proven to be a major asset for making our Society more professional. I would like to express special thanks to our meeting planner, Shauney Wilson and her colleague Shawna Lampkin, and to Carolin Lorenz for organizing this year's meeting in Amsterdam. I would like to thank the PhD students and postdocs in my own research group, who were tremendously helpful in organizing this year's meeting, including designing the cover of the program booklet, the T-shirt, etcetera. Without their contributions this meeting simply would not have taken place. In addition, I would like to express my sincere thanks to our sponsors, whose substantial financial contributions have made it possible to hold this meeting while keeping registration fees affordable. The program of this year's meeting has a line-up of excellent keynote speakers, a debate on the foundations of the neurobiology of language, and for the first time, a symposium. At the core of our meeting, however, are your contributions: posters, oral slide sessions, and active participation at the different sessions. You are the sole reason for the existence of this Society, and its continued success depends on you. Therefore we will continue to need your active contributions and feedback. On behalf of the SNL Board and the local organizers, welcome to Amsterdam, historically a central hub in worldwide communication and the exchange of goods, science and arts. In line with this history, I hope that this year's meeting will encourage you to build your own connections with colleagues and students from around the world.

Towards a new neurobiology of language

2012

Theoretical advances in language research and the availability of increasingly high-resolution experimental techniques in the cognitive neurosciences are profoundly changing how we investigate and conceive of the neural basis of speech and language processing. Recent work closely aligns language research with issues at the core of systems neuroscience, ranging from neurophysiological and neuroanatomic characterizations to questions about neural coding. Here we highlight, across different aspects of language processing (perception, production, sign language, meaning construction), new insights and approaches to the neurobiology of language, aiming to describe promising new areas of investigation in which the neurosciences intersect with linguistic research more closely than before. This paper summarizes in brief some of the issues that constitute the background for talks presented in a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. It is not a comprehensive review of any of the issues that are discussed in the symposium.

The Neurobiology of Language

One of the most challenging issues related to human language is understanding how it is organized and processed in the brain. Such study is described under the broad rubric of the neurobiology of language and defines the field ofneurolinguistics. The domain of inquiry has largely focused on investigations of aphasic patients, exploring the clinical and behavioral manifestations of their disorder and the accompanying lesion localization. These "experiments in nature" provide the traditional approach to the study of language/brain relations, and without question, they have provided, the major insights to date. Nevertheless, in more recent years, the increased sophistication of electrophysiological and metabolic techniques has provided a new and exciting approach to the study of the neurobiology of language. These latter studies allow investigation of neural activity in normal subjects in addition to the study of brain-damaged patients. Taken together, these three approaches: clinical/lesion investigations using imaging techniques such as computerized axial tomography (CAT scan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); electrophysiological studies using evoked related potentials (ERP); and metabolic techniques using positron emission tomography (PET), provide converging data on the nature of the representation of language, the processes involved in language use, and ultimately its underlying neural organization.

Neurological Foundations of Language: Emerging Perspectives

Llengua, Societat i Comunicació, 2015

Recent advances in the context of the biological studies of the human language capacity make it clear that a successful marriage of the relevant disciplines— linguistics and biology, broadly construed—will require a serious rethinking of the neurobiological foundations of language. It is our aim in this paper to give a flavor of some of the results of current investigations carried out by our research group that we think contribute to this emerging neurobiology of language.

Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics

Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2008

Speech perception consists of a set of computations that take continuously varying acoustic waveforms as input and generate discrete representations that make contact with the lexical representations stored in long-term memory as output. Because the perceptual objects that are recognized by the speech perception enter into subsequent linguistic computation, the format that is used for lexical representation and processing fundamentally constrains the speech perceptual processes. Consequently, theories of speech perception must, at some level, be tightly linked to theories of lexical representation. Minimally, speech perception must yield representations that smoothly and rapidly interface with stored lexical items. Adopting the perspective of Marr, we argue and provide neurobiological and psychophysical evidence for the following research programme. First, at the implementational level, speech perception is a multi-time resolution process, with perceptual analyses occurring concurrently on at least two time scales (approx. 20-80 ms, approx. 150-300 ms), commensurate with (sub)segmental and syllabic analyses, respectively. Second, at the algorithmic level, we suggest that perception proceeds on the basis of internal forward models, or uses an 'analysis-by-synthesis' approach. Third, at the computational level (in the sense of Marr), the theory of lexical representation that we adopt is principally informed by phonological research and assumes that words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of sequences of discrete segments composed of distinctive features. One important goal of the research programme is to develop linking hypotheses between putative neurobiological primitives (e.g. temporal primitives) and those primitives derived from linguistic inquiry, to arrive ultimately at a biologically sensible and theoretically satisfying model of representation and computation in speech.

NEURONAL NETWORK AND LANGUAGE: A NEED FOR CHANGE AND EXPANSION OF TERMINOLOGY

This paper draws upon recent researches on language, carried out using various scanning and imaging techniques, like EEG, PET and fMRI. The findings of various researches suggest that parts of the right hemisphere, relative to Broca's area and Wernicke's area in the left hemisphere, are involved in the processing of language in ways that were not previously observed, and argues for a change in the existing labels of some areas of the brain to be more accurate. This paper argues for a removing the exclusivity of " language areas " in the left hemisphere and recognizing the right as essential in language making and processing, and proposes " semantic and lexical comprehension " and " verbal output/production " instead of the commonly held " language comprehension " and " language processing " labels, and bringing prosody and intonation under language areas, too, by using clearer expressions " figurative and prosodic comprehension " (instead of sensory prosody/intonation) and " figurative and prosodic production/utterance " (instead of motor prosody/intonation). The paper also suggests that the word " areas " be changed to " regions " as present researches show that often, regions are involved instead of the watertight areas held as per convention, and using 'Broca's region' and 'Wernicke's region' and in general, 'language regions'.

Future perspectives in neurobiological investigation of language

2012

Studying language as an object of the biological world requires the resolution of the mind-brain problem. While contemporary theoretical linguistics has addressed the problem adopting a dualistic approach (in which the representational and algorithmic nature of linguistic knowledge can be investigated independently by brain activity), cognitive neuroscience has privileged an anti-dualistic perspective (in which the direct observation of the brain can reveal the higher-level cognitive properties of the language faculty).

Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity, by Angela D. Friederici

Journal of Language Evolution

Language as shaped by the brain

Understanding the architecture of language: the possible role of neurology

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2006

individual, the opponent action might require a form of cognitive control. For instance, an individual might only reassess the situation, and consider different options, when she detects a mismatch between response bias and reward availability. Previous research has already suggested that the anterior cingulate cortex plays an important role in evaluating potential conflicts and effort-related decisions . Might the opponent action in centromedian nucleus in some way depend on input from anterior cingulate cortex?