Saturday, February 4, 2012

Any dedicated region for language?

There is a recent study by MIT scientists investigating whether there are any human brain regions specifically dedicated to high-level linguistic processing. There are conflicting answers between neuropsychological and neuroimaging literatures about whether there is such a selective region or not. They use functional MRI to define classic language regions in individual participants, and then examine the response of these regions to the high-level nonlinguistic functions: arithmetic, music, cognitive control, and spatial/verbal working memory. They claim that there are no or little response in language regions to these nonlinguistic functions. However, there are some problems with their analysis: first, not every subject did all experiments, so they apparently averaged over subjects, and it makes the data unclean. Second, 4 nonlinguistic experiments used in this study do not include all possible cognitive abilities of humans; obviously, such critics makes almost impossible the design of any experiment for such investigations of localizations.

No comments:

Post a Comment