Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model
TL;DR: It is proposed that "language" disorders, such as specific language impairment and non-fluent and fluent aphasia, may be profitably viewed as impairments primarily affecting one or the other brain system, and suggested a new neurocognitive framework for the study of lexicon and grammar.
About: This article is published in Cognition.The article was published on 2004-05-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1493 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Language disorder & Specific language impairment.
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TL;DR: Neuroimaging data support the notion that the neural representation of a second language converges with the representation of that language learned as a first language and that language production in bilinguals is a dynamic process involving cortical and subcortical structures that make use of inhibition to resolve lexical competition and to select the intended language.
993 citations
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...ARTICLE IN PRESS J. Abutalebi, D. Green / Journal of Neurolinguistics 20 (2007) 242–275 253 explicit, metalinguistic knowledge rather than by implicit grammatical competence that is procedurally represented (Paradis, 1994, 2004; Ullman, 2001, 2004)....
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...Within normal bilinguals, performance decrements, induced by cognitive load, may be overcome by increasing the resources that modulate attention (see also Ullman, 2004)....
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...Ullman (2001, 2004) argued that L2 grammatical knowledge is acquired explicitly and is represented declaratively in a left temporal area along with L1 and L2 vocabulary....
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...Conceivably then a different system is used compared to that of native speakers of that language (e.g., Albert & Obler, 1978; Ullman, 2001, 2004)....
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TL;DR: It is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further biological changes.
Abstract: The article analyzes the neural and functional grounding of language skills as well as their emergence in hominid evolution, hypothesizing stages leading from abilities known to exist in monkeys and apes and presumed to exist in our hominid ancestors right through to modern spoken and signed languages. The starting point is the observation that both premotor area F5 in monkeys and Broca's area in humans contain a "mirror system" active for both execution and observation of manual actions, and that F5 and Broca's area are homologous brain regions. This grounded the mirror system hypothesis of Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) which offers the mirror system for grasping as a key neural "missing link" between the abilities of our nonhuman ancestors of 20 million years ago and modern human language, with manual gestures rather than a system for vocal communication providing the initial seed for this evolutionary process. The present article, however, goes "beyond the mirror" to offer hypotheses on evolutionary changes within and outside the mirror sys- tems which may have occurred to equip Homo sapiens with a language-ready brain. Crucial to the early stages of this progression is the mirror system for grasping and its extension to permit imitation. Imitation is seen as evolving via a so-called simple system such as that found in chimpanzees (which allows imitation of complex "object-oriented" sequences but only as the result of extensive practice) to a so-called complex system found in humans (which allows rapid imitation even of complex sequences, under appropriate conditions) which supports pantomime. This is hypothesized to have provided the substrate for the development of protosign, a combinatorially open reper- toire of manual gestures, which then provides the scaffolding for the emergence of protospeech (which thus owes little to nonhuman vo- calizations), with protosign and protospeech then developing in an expanding spiral. It is argued that these stages involve biological evo- lution of both brain and body. By contrast, it is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further bio- logical changes.
918 citations
Cites background from "Contributions of memory circuits to..."
..., Rizzolatti, G. & Fogassi, L. (2003) Mirror neurons References/Arbib: From monkey-like action recognition to human language...
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01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: The neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts are related, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.
Abstract: The authors conceptualize these memory systems from both behavioural and neurobiological perspectives, guided by three related principles: * First, that our understanding of a wide range of memory phenomena can be advanced by breaking down memory into multiple forms with different operating characteristics. * Second, that different forms of memory representation are supported by distinct brain pathways with circuitry and neural coding properties. * Third, that the contributions of different brain systems can be compared and contrasted by distinguishing between dedicated (or specific) and elaborate (or general) memory systems. A primary goal of this work is to relate the neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.
746 citations
TL;DR: This work concludes that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable, and suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.
Abstract: It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG - the mesh between learners and languages - arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism," which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.
743 citations
Cites background from "Contributions of memory circuits to..."
...Together, these studies strongly suggest that there is considerable overlap in the neural mechanisms involved in language and sequential learning14 (see also Conway et al. 2007; Ullman 2004; Wilkins & Wakefield 1995, for similar perspectives)....
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TL;DR: It is argued that the data support the predictions of the PDH, and particularly implicate Broca's area within frontal cortex, and the caudate nucleus within the basal ganglia, which form the basis of a novel and potentially productive perspective on SLI.
738 citations
References
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TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.
12,586 citations
"Contributions of memory circuits to..." refers background in this paper
...Most linguistic theories assume an organization in which syntactic computations draw words from the “lexicon” (Anderson, 1992; Chomsky, 1965, 1970; Di Sciullo & Williams, 1987; Jackendoff, 1997; Lieber, 1992)....
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...Language depends upon a memorized “mental lexicon” and a computational “mental grammar” (Chomsky, 1965, 1995; de Saussure, 1959; Pinker, 1994).1 The mental lexicon is a repository of all idiosyncratic word-specific information....
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...The structure of the brain and the nature of evolution suggest that, despite its uniqueness, language likely depends on brain systems that also subserve other functions....
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Book•
01 May 1965
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
Abstract: : Contents: Methodological preliminaries: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammars; formal and substantive grammars; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning; generative capacity and its linguistic relevance Categories and relations in syntactic theory: Scope of the base; aspects of deep structure; illustrative fragment of the base component; types of base rules Deep structures and grammatical transformations Residual problems: Boundaries of syntax and semantics; structure of the lexicon
12,225 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."
Abstract: A classic work that situates linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, formulating and developing the minimalist program. In his foundational book, The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, Noam Chomsky offered a significant contribution to the generative tradition in linguistics. This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues this classic work with a new preface by the author. In four essays, Chomsky attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, with the essays formulating and progressively developing the minimalist approach to linguistic theory. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. In the preface to this edition, Chomsky emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory." With this book, Chomsky built on pursuits from the earliest days of generative grammar to formulate a new research program that had far-reaching implications for the field.
9,104 citations
TL;DR: The basal ganglia serve primarily to integrate diverse inputs from the entire cerebral cortex and to "funnel" these influences, via the ventrolateral thalamus, to the motor cortex.
Abstract: Information about the basal ganglia has accumulated at a prodigious pace over the past decade, necessitating major revisions in our concepts of the structural and functional organization of these nuclei. From earlier data it had appeared that the basal ganglia served primarily to integrate diverse inputs from the entire cerebral cortex and to "funnel" these influences, via the ventrolateral thalamus, to the motor cortex (Allen & Tsukahara 1974, Evarts & Thach 1969, Kemp & Powell 1971). In particular, the basal
8,111 citations
"Contributions of memory circuits to..." refers background in this paper
...The putamen is particularly important for motor functions, whereas the caudate appears to underlie aspects of cognition (Alexander et al., 1986; Middleton & Strick, 2000a)....
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...These findings lead to highly specific predictions about language....
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...Importantly, the various connections within the basal ganglia contain parallel and largely functionally segregated “circuits” (i.e. channels) (Alexander & Crutcher, 1990; Alexander et al., 1986; Middleton & Strick, 2000a,b)....
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