The Neurobiology of Structure‐Dependency in Natural Language Grammar

A research program in neuroimaging for an evolutionary theory of syntax

“…The association between the MNS and syntax has largely originated from consistent neuroimaging evidence of the activation of the left-hemispheric BA 44 by hierarchical syntactic processing tasks (for reviews, see Tettamanti and Perani [2012] and Tettamanti and Moro [2012]), and from the aforementioned idea that human BA 44 is the homologue of monkey's area F5 hosting mirror neurons. Now, the discovery that human BA 44 has its proper homologous brain region in the macaque, as well as in the chimpanzee (Sherwood et al 2003), potentially avoids the problem of implicating mirror neurons in syntactic processing, particularly if we postulate that the marked tissue expansion of BA44 in humans compared to monkeys (Petrides and Pandya 2009) is not driven by a major increase in mirror neuron cells, but rather to an increase of non-mirror, heteromodal cells.…”

“…In order to properly address the MNH that syntax is mainly the product of cultural evolution, a paradigmatic shift in neuroimaging studies is in need. So far, most neuroimaging studies on complex syntactic properties have concentrated on the investigation of abstract hierarchical rule learning -leading to an evolutionary challenging debate on possible abilities homologous to humans in non-human primates (Saffran et al 2008), dolphins (Herman et al 1993), and birds (Stobbe et al 2012) -and of sentence processing (Tettamanti and Perani 2012). With some notable exceptions, the focus of these studies has hinged on the dissection of an isolable syntactic component and on its inherent neurobiological basis from a rather universalistic perspective, i.e.…”