fMRI investigations of the functional architecture of the language system

语言是我们标志性的人类认知技能。然而，许多关于大脑基础的关键问题 语言和特定皮质区域在语言行为中的作用仍未得到回答。最新研究 在人脑中表现出高度的解剖学和功能变异性，因此表明传统的 过去绝大多数语言研究中使用的群体分析可能并不是最优的。超过了 在过去的几年里，我开发了新的技术-采用了成功的fMRI方法 视觉研究--从功能上“定位”大脑对高级语言处理敏感的区域。这 该方法已经取得了一些重要成果。例如，我演示了支持以下内容的区域 高级语言处理对一些非语言功能反应很小或没有反应，这些功能已经 之前曾有人认为，语言与认知和神经机制是相同的，包括算术处理， 一般工作记忆、一般认知控制或音乐处理。此外，我发现， 词汇和句法表征在人类的大脑和大脑中紧密结合在一起：任何大脑区域 即对词级意义敏感，也对组合(即，句法和成分)敏感 语义)信息。在接下来的三年里，我将在这些成果的基础上，以及在 心理语言学和理论语言学，以理解我们执行的计算和 我们在语言处理过程中建立的表征，并提供大脑的详细特征 这些计算和表示的基础区域。我的工作将保持在两个左右 关于语言系统功能结构的基本问题：一)语言 处理采用特定领域的机制，还是依赖更通用的机制；以及ii) 语言系统的内部功能组织是什么？除了刻画 健康个体的语言系统，我现在开始检查大脑皮层组织的变化 语言在发展性和获得性语言障碍中的作用。

Language is our signature human cognitive skill. Yet, many critical questions regarding the brain basis of language and the role of specific cortical regions in linguistic behavior remain unanswered. Recent research demonstrated high anatomical and functional variability in human brains, thus suggesting that traditional group analyses - applied in the vast majority of the past language studies - may not be optimal. Over the last few years, I developed new techniques - adopted from fMRI methods that have been successful in vision research - to functionally "localize" brain regions sensitive to high-level linguistic processing. This approach has already yielded some important results. For example, I demonstrated that regions that support high-level linguistic processing show little or no response to several non-linguistic functions that have been previously argued to share cognitive and neural machinery with language, including arithmetic processing, general working memory, general cognitive control or musical processing. Furthermore, I discovered that lexical and syntactic representations are tightly integrated in the human mind and brain: any brain region that is sensitive to word-level meanings is also sensitive to combinatorial (i.e., syntactic and compositional semantic) information. Over the next three years, I will build on these results, as well as on prior work in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, to understand the computations we perform and the representations we build during language processing, and to provide a detailed characterization of the brain regions underlying these computations and representations. My work will remain centered around two fundamental questions about the functional architecture of the language system: i) does language processing engage domain-specific mechanisms or does it rely on more general-purpose machinery; and ii) what is the internal functional organization of the language system? In addition to characterizing the language system in healthy individuals, I am now beginning to examine changes in the cortical organization of language in developmental and acquired language disorders.