Wired for Words: Understanding Language and the Brain

"In their classic 1998 textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Ivry, and George Mangun made a sobering observation: there was no clear mapping between how we process language and what was happening in our brains. Fast forward to today, and the landscape has changed dramatically. We now have a much more sophisticated understanding of language's neural architecture-not just the basic abilities of speaking and understanding, but the intricate computational machinery that makes human communication possible."

"The Core Insight: Language as a "Species" of Sensorimotor Processing The most provocative claim of the LSM is that language processing shares the same fundamental neural architecture as non-linguistic sensorimotor systems-like reaching for a coffee cup or tracking a moving object with your eyes. This doesn't mean language is "just" movement or that decades of linguistic research are invalid. Rather, it suggests an evolutionary relationship: the two types of systems ar"

Remarkable progress over the past 25 years has produced a sophisticated neural architecture for language, moving far beyond late-20th-century models. Neural models now characterize not only speaking and comprehension but the computational machinery supporting complex communication. The Linguistic-Sensorimotor Model (LSM) proposes that language processing uses the same fundamental neural architecture as non-linguistic sensorimotor systems. The LSM frames language as evolutionarily related to sensorimotor control without reducing language to mere movement, preserving linguistic theorizing. Significant questions remain, including the mechanisms underlying hemispheric asymmetry for language and how sensorimotor and linguistic computations integrate.

Read at Psychology Today