Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - 2008 - Volume 31, Issue 05  

Open Peer Commentary

Cortical-striatal-cortical neural circuits, reiteration, and the “narrow faculty of language”

Philip Liebermana1

a1 Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1978. Philip_Lieberman@brown.edu

Abstract

Neural circuits linking local operations in the cortex and the basal ganglia confer reiterative capacities, expressed in seemingly unrelated human traits such as speech, syntax, adaptive actions to changing circumstances, dancing, and music. Reiteration allows the formation of a potentially unbounded number of sentences from a finite set of syntactic processes, obviating the need for the hypothetical “Narrow Faculty of Language.”

Related Articles

    Language as shaped by the brain Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, and Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 christiansen@cornell.edu http://www.psych.cornell.edu/people/Faculty/mhc27.html; Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom n.chater@ucl.ac.uk http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/people/profiles/chater_nick.htm