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Contributed by Nancy Kanwisher, August 9, 2011 (sent for review July 13, 2011)
Abstract
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 in multifunctional brain regions. For the critical case of language, conflicting answers arise from the neuropsychological literature, which features striking dissociations between deficits in linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities, vs. the neuroimaging literature, which has argued for overlap between activations for linguistic and nonlinguistic processes, including arithmetic, domain general abilities like cognitive control, and music. Here, we use functional MRI to define classic language regions functionally in each subject individually and then examine the response of these regions to the nonlinguistic functions most commonly argued to engage these regions: arithmetic, working memory, cognitive control, and music. We find little or no response in language regions to these nonlinguistic functions. These data support a clear distinction between language and other cognitive processes, resolving the prior conflict between the neuropsychological and neuroimaging literatures.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: evelina9{at}mit.edu or ngk{at}mit.edu.
Author contributions: E.F. and N.K. designed research; E.F. and M.K.B. performed research; E.F. analyzed data; and E.F. and N.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
*Of course, the question of the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic processes extends to other aspects of language (e.g., sound-level processes), which we are not targeting with the current language localizer task. However, most claims about the overlap between linguistic and nonlinguistic processes have concerned (i) syntactic processing, which is included in our functional contrast, and (ii) brain regions, which are robustly activated by our localizer (e.g., Broca's area).
†Overlapping sets of subjects were run on different nonlinguistic tasks; hence, the total number of participants (n = 48) is less than the sum of all of the numbers of participants across the seven experiments.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1112937108/-/DCSupplemental.
Functional specificity for high-level linguistic processing in the human brain
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