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Poster A42 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Temporal regions are the epicenter of language processing in the human brain
Greta Tuckute1 (), Aalok Sathe1, Jingyuan Selena She1, Evelina Fedorenko1; 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, USA
Human language processing is seemingly effortless and is supported by an interconnected set of frontal and temporal areas in the left-hemisphere. These areas respond in similar ways to diverse linguistic manipulations, suggesting some degree of redundancy. Here, we ask: what are the most essential parts of the human language system? We define a region as essential if it shows ubiquitous engagement during the processing of any linguistic input, written or spoken. We find that the temporal areas are essential to language processing, and that frontal areas do not appear necessary when linguistic input is sufficiently easy to process. Our results suggest that although in most scenarios language areas work together to efficiently process linguistic input, the temporal component of the language network is indispensable whereas other language areas play an auxiliary role and perhaps help interface linguistic representations with other networks across the brain.
Keywords: language redundancy amodal processing fmri