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Article published In:
How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map
Edited by Michael A. Arbib
[Interaction Studies 19:1/2] 2018
► pp. 22–37

Computational challenges of evolving the language-ready brain

2. Building towards neurolinguistics

| University of California at San Diego

A theory of evolving the language-ready brain requires a theory of what it is that evolved. We offer the TCG (Template Construction Grammar) model of comprehension and production of utterances to exhibit hypotheses on how utterances may link to “what language is about.” A key subsystem of TCG is the SemRep system for semantic representation of a visual scene. We offer an account of how it may have evolved as an expansion of the ventral pathway supporting the planning of manual actions, complemented by a dorsal pathway for articulation. The Mirror System Hypothesis (MSH) claims that early Homo sapiens had protolanguage but not language and that cultural evolution yielded the social structures within which children could indeed acquire language. The article poses the challenge of understanding how a brain system could be innately specified that could develop into a TCG-like form, posing a range of questions for future research.

Keywords: Mirror System Hypothesis (MSH), protolanguage, language-ready brain, SemRep, template construction grammar (TCG), holophrases, fractionation, constructions, neurocomputational principles, schema theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Template Construction Grammar (TCG) model for how the human brain may support language production and comprehension
    • 2.1Modeling using schema theory
    • 2.2A model of language production for visual scene description
    • 2.3A model of language comprehension for visual scene description
  • 3.An evolutionary framework for language-ready pathways and processes
    • 3.1SemRep in LCA-m
    • 3.2SemRep in LCA-c
    • 3.3SemRep in the language-ready brain
    • 3.4Implications
  • 4.Complex action recognition and imitation support the transition to language
  • 5.Towards a new road map
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.17036.arb
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