The neural basis of linguistic meaning
Abstract:
Language is a function of the human brain.
Traditionally it was proposed that language is mainly implemented in two specific regions of the left brain hemisphere: Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Modern neuroscience confirmed the relevance of these areas, although it has revealed a much more complex functional architecture of language, which is broadly distributed throughout the brain. Here I argue that language is evolutionarily very recent in our species and opportunistically reuses or recycles ancient networks, primarily devoted to non-linguistic functions. Specifically, I will review some evidence that the perceptual and motor brain networks are partially reused to implement word meaning, that is, language is embodied. Even the understanding of abstract language such as negative sentences (Do not write the letter) relies on general mechanisms of motor inhibition, the ones involved in stopping an ongoing action, which is reused to reduce the activation of the negated concepts. We concluded that a distributed functional architecture based on functional recycling is extremely efficient, as demonstrates the case of the most complex computational system of nature: the human brain.
