My recommendation would be to check out the research by Jim Magnuson and his collaborators at Haskins Laboratories.

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/research.html

Best wishes,

Damian

My recommendation would be to check out the research by Jim Magnuson and his collaborators at Haskins Laboratories.

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/research.html

Best wishes,

Damian

There are a number of good papers from Li Hai Tan on neural correlates of Mandarin characters: Human Brain Mapping 10:16–27(2000), NeuroImage 13, 836–846 (2001)

full list: http://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp01202/publications.html?open=journal&sort_byjournal=1&orderjournal=asc&rppjournal=20&etaljournal=-1&startjournal=0

-Reese

A lot of the actual neuroscience work done to delineate the neural basis of acquisition, refinement, and crystallization of meaningful sounds from other members of the same species has been preformed in songbirds; this includes a number of lesion and circuit mapping studies. Give a look at a good review and go from there!

Take a look at Terence Deacon's book "The Symbolic Species", which suggests language is related to the dynamic relationship between parents and children during development, where children "condition" parents to structure their speech to meet ongoing communication needs. In this way, language becomes instantiated in the brain through development. Surprisingly, Chomsky does not subscribe to an evolutionary origin of speech championed be Pinker even though he regards fundamental aspects as hard wired. Recent work in neuroscience indicates that speech processing in the brain recruits many more areas than previously thought, which concurs with Deacon's ideas.

There are several review papers and a couple of books on the subject that are very interesting, but if you are only interested in recent publications, I would suggest the book "Talking Heads: The Neuroscience of Language" by Denes, which was published two or three years ago. Although not so recent, the "The Neuroscience of Language:

On Brain Circuits of Words and Serial Order", by Pulvermüller (2003), is also an interesting book. 

Recently, it has been argued that the best data comes from stimulating the brain directly in awake surgery. I would suggest to check out the papers of Hughes Duffau, Mitchel Berger (both neurosurgeons with research interests in neuroscience-language). There are also 3 very good Neurolinguists that evaluate language functions during the procedure and publish very interesting things: Djaina Satoer, Elke De WItte, and Silvie Moritz-Gasser.

See some books that will published in this field:

http://routledge-ny.com/catalogs/cognition_and_cognitive_neuroscience/1/8/

Best regards,

Henrique.

In French Guyane  exists interest researchs about how to teach a language and adopt a method that correspond of the psychologie and culture of the native amerindien... teaching french ato amerindien as to french children is not succesfull because their language  is oral and not written and their syntaxe is very different... it could be a good example for your interest. 

Check out Andrea Moro's "The boundaries of babel: the brain and the enigma of impossible languages". It relates directly to your question on innateness.

As an example of an alternative approach you might try this:

Thibault Paul John Language Behavior as Catalytic Prosess: Steps Towards a Theory of Living Language (Part 1) and (part 2) (2011). The public journal of semiotics . ISSN 1918-9907. 3 (2),

good day to all, my suggestion is to read the books written by Andrea Moro. He dedicated his researches at what you are looking for: syntax, possible languages and natural language learning. Take a look also to Jackendoff and Chomsky studies about grammar

Cher Monsieur Comeau. Je cherche depuis une vingtaine d'années à resensibiliser la communauté à tout un ensemble de recherches sur ce sujet dont les références semblent être tombées dans l'oublie au fil du temps. En 2003 j'ai publié une synthèse listant l'ensemble de ces références, depuis Pavlov jusqu'à la synthèse de Eccles dans les années 1990. Voici un lien vers l'ouvrage, dont le premier 15% est en accès libre. Si l'ouvrage vous intéresse, il me fera plaisir de vous en faire parvenir un exemplaire complet, français et/ou anglais à votre choix. Je n'ai rien découvert moi-même. Il s'agit d'une synthèse, selon ma compréhension, de l'ensemble du contenu de ces références.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/156882

Hi Samuel, it has long been known that the neuroscience of language(s) has to do with the oro-laryngeal parts of Brodmann's areas 4 (motor), 3, 1 & 2 (sensory), Broca (motor), Wernicke & the insula (sensory), the fasciculus arcuatus etc. One of the recent discoveries seems to be the work of S.Brown's team, e.g. "A larynx area in the human motor cortex" Brown, Ngan & Liotti 2008 Cer.Cortex 18:837-845 ("The map of the human motor cortex has lacked a representation for the intrinsic musculature of the larynx ever since the electrical stimulation studies of Penfield ... using fMRI ... We had subjects perform a series of oral tasks designed to isolate elementary components of phonation & articulation, incl. vocalization of a vowel, lip movement & tongue movement ... we had subjects perform glottal stops (forced closure of the glottis in the absence of vocalizing). The results demonstrated a larynx-specific area in the motor cortex that is activated comparably by vocal & non-vocal laryngeal tasks. Converging evidence suggests that this area is the principal vocal center of the human motor cortex. Finally, the location of this larynx area is strikingly different from that reported in the monkey ... implications of this observation for the evolution of vocal communication in humans.") This is the same for all languages: AFAIK, there are no neurological difference between different languages. How the human brain becomes mature & functional for verbal communication has to do IMO with how human language (speech) evolved, see e.g. our work on Pleistocene archaic Homo's littoral intercontinental dispersal along African & Eurasian coasts & rivers (S.Munro 2010): shallow diving & breathing control; suction of soft seafoods vs biting-chewing; brain expansion cf brain-specific nutrients in shellfish; vocal learning & provisioning of one own's family), e.g. see attachment.

Mark

You may be interested to know that detailed study and mapping of the verbal areas dates way further back than Penfield.

Pavlov was the first to connect the establishement of language in the verbal areas to the kinesthetic excitation induced by the use of the speech organs. Unfortunately, his work in this area is currently available only in German and was never translated to English:

Ref: Lothar Pickenhein. I. P. Pawlow - Gesammelte Werke - Über die Physiologie und Pathologie der höhere Nerventätigkeit, Ergon Verlag, Germany 1998.

 Free translation oft he pertaining Pavlov comment dating from the 1930's:

“In superior animals, including humans, there develops, in the brain's hemi-spheres, a first system of signalization that brings to the individual's attention the signals originating from the environment and emotions. In human beings, a second system of signalization brings to the attention of the individual the signals of the first system. This second system is made up of cerebral structures created by the kinesthetic excitation induced by the use of the speech organs."

His work was picked up and carried out by Paul Chauchard, neurophysiologist and Director of Research at l'École des Hautes Études in France in the 1950's, and other French neuroscientists in the 1940's and 1950's. Their work was never translated to English. Their ultimate conclusions were exposed in a now very difficult to obtain book by Paul Chauchard

Ref: Paul Chauchard, Le cerveau et la conscience, Les éditions du Seuil, France, 1960

A good synthesis of the research carried out in Europe in the first part of the 20th century can be found in this ref:

John C. Eccles. Évolution du cerveau et création de la conscience, Flammarion, France, 1994

Quite a bit of the material referenced was never translated to English.

 Way more advanced material than anything available today,  even with MRI imaging.

Thanks to those who replied, I start having quite a lot of informations on this topic. Much appreciated. 

Thanks, André, yes, we already knew a lot before fMRI, but whether this was "way more advanced than anything available today" I don't know.

In any case, how human language evolved can best be understood, not in the light of the conventional open plain hypotheses (ape->human = quadru->bipedal = forest->plain), but in the light of human waterside evolution (Pleistocene Homo's dispersal along coasts & rivers, see attachment).

Marc

Just an example of an important discovery that I see no trace of in any current referenced work. The discovery that the myelinization of all verbal areas appears to be genetically delayed in our species until the age about 7, which seems to explain why children so easily learn to speak any language, even many languages during youth.

The bulk of this research can be found in work dating back the 1920's: "Anatomie des Menschlichen Gehirns und Rückenmarks auf Myelogenetischen Grundlage" by Paul Fleisig.

If this is so, and considering that the neocortex areas dealing with writing and reading are different  from those dealing with speaking but also are concerned, doesn't this hint that teaching all children to read and write to minimal autonomy before the age of 7 would be hugely beneficial?

Much more is available in the references I gave.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Comeau & readers,

Readers of this thread may find the following question of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_language_and_how_is_the_term_language_defined_in_linguistics_and_philosophy_of_language3

Many thanks for your kind attention.

H.G. Callaway

Dear André Michaud, sorry for this (very) late answer. Yes, you may well be right, I have no idea, but it's worth being investigated I'd think. Note "verbal areas" are not necessarily or exclusively connected with speech or language (they probably did evolve *for* speech, but might have been preadaptive to speech origins). It may also been that musical skills are involved and/or that it has to do with (the disappearance or reduction of) shallow-diving or airway-closing adaptations, probably in early H.sapiens (cf attachment, and ontogeny +-recapitulating phylogeny).