fMRI investigations of the functional architecture of the language system

语言是我们人类认知技能的标志。然而，许多关于大脑基础的关键问题， 语言和特定皮层区域在语言行为中的作用仍然没有答案。最近的研究 在人类大脑中表现出高度的解剖学和功能变异性，从而表明传统的 过去绝大多数语言研究采用的群体分析法可能并不理想。来 在过去的几年里，我开发了新的技术-从功能磁共振成像方法，已成功地在 视觉研究--在功能上“定位”对高级语言处理敏感的大脑区域。这 这种方法已经取得了一些重要成果。例如，我证明了支持 高级语言处理对几种非语言功能表现出很少或没有反应， 以前认为，共享认知和神经机制与语言，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， 词汇和句法表征紧密地整合在人类的思维和大脑中：任何大脑区域 对单词级含义敏感的也对组合敏感（即，句法和成分 语义）信息。在接下来的三年里，我将以这些成果为基础， 心理语言学和理论语言学，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 这些计算和表示背后的区域。我的工作将继续围绕两个 关于语言系统功能结构的基本问题：i）语言 处理采用特定领域的机制，还是依赖于更通用的机制;以及ii） 语言系统的内部功能组织是什么？除了描述 为了研究健康个体的语言系统，我现在开始研究大脑皮层组织的变化 发展性和获得性语言障碍的语言。

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.