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Finding Language in the

Brain
Psycholinguist Giosuè Baggio sheds light on the thrilling, evolving field of
neurolinguistics, where neuroscience and linguistics meet.

By: Giosuè Baggio Aa     

hat exactly is language? At first thought, it’s a continuous flow of
W sounds we hear, sounds we make, scribbles on paper or on a screen,
movements of our hands, and expressions on our faces. But if we pause for a
moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something
different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of
construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger
structures still.

We can choose the pieces and put them together with some freedom, but not
anything goes. There are rules, constraints. And no half measures. Either a
sound is used in a word, or it’s not; either a word is used in a sentence, or it’s
not. But unlike Lego, language is abstract: Eventually, one runs out of Lego
bricks, whereas there could be no shortage of the sound b, and no cap on
reusing the word “beautiful” in as many utterances as there are beautiful
things to talk about.

Language is a calculus

It’s tempting to see languages as mathematical systems of some kind. Indeed,

languages are calculi, in a very real sense, as real as the senses in which they
are changing historical objects, means of communication, inner voices,
vehicles of identity, instruments of persuasion, and mediums of great art.
But while all these aspects of language strike us almost immediately, as they
have philosophers for centuries, the connection between language and
computation is not immediately apparent — nor do all scholars agree that it
is even right to make it.

It took all the ingenuity of linguists, like

Giosuè Baggio is the author of
“Neurolinguistics.” Noam Chomsky, and logicians, like Richard
Montague, starting in the 1950s, to build
mathematical systems that could capture
language. Chomsky-style calculi tell us what
words can go where in a sentence’s structure
(syntax); Montague-style calculi tell us how
language expresses relations between sets
(semantics). They also remind us that no
language could function without operations
that put together words and ideas in the
right ways: The sentence “I want that
beautiful tree in our garden” is not a random
configuration of words; its meaning is not
completely open to interpretation — it is the tree, not the garden, that is
beautiful; it is the garden, not the tree, that is ours.

Language in the brain

At this point, most linguists would probably be content with saying that
calculi are handy constructs, tools we need in order to make rational sense of
the jumble that is language. But if pressed, they would admit that the brain
has to be doing some of that stuff, too. When you hear, read, or see “I want
that beautiful tree in our garden,” something inside your head has to put
together those words in the right way — not, say, in the way that yields the
message that I want that tree in our beautiful garden.

The language-as-calculus idea may well be the best

model of language in the brain we currently have
— or perhaps the worst, except for all the others.

Linguists, logicians, and philosophers, for at least the first half of the 20th
century, resisted the idea that language is in the brain. If it is anywhere at all,
they estimated, it is out there, in the community of speakers. For
neurologists such as Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, active in the second half
of the 19th century, the answer was different. They had shown that lesions
to certain parts of the cerebral cortex could lead to specific disorders of
spoken language, known as “aphasias.” It took an entire century — from
around 1860 to 1960 — for the ideas that language is in the brain and that
language is a calculus to meet, for neurology and linguistics to blend into
neurolinguistics.

If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we
find some of the signatures of a computational system at work. If we record
electric or magnetic fields produced by the brain, for example, we find
signals that are only sensitive to the identity of the sound one is hearing —
say, that it is a b, instead of a d — and not to the pitch, volume, or any other
concrete and contingent features of the speech sound. At some level, the
brain treats each sound as an abstract variable in a calculus: a b like any
other, not this particular b. The brain also reacts differently to grammar
errors, as in “I want that beautiful trees in our garden,” and incongruities of
meaning, as in “I want that beautiful democracy in our garden”: Rules and
constraints matter. We are slowly figuring out how the brain operates with
the abstract system that is language, how it arranges morphemes — the
smallest grammatical units of meaning — into words, words into phrases,
and so on, on the fly. We know that it often looks ahead in time, trying to
anticipate what new information might arrive, and that words and ideas are
combined by a few different operations, not just one, kicking in at slightly
different times and originating in different parts of the brain.

Software and hardware?

The language-as-calculus idea may well be the best model of language in the
brain we currently have — or perhaps the worst, except for all the others.
Like all ideas in science, it has limitations. Like all crisp, powerful ideas, it
can easily misguide. For example, it may seem to suggest that the language
calculus is a program run by the brain. And in some sense it is, just not in the
familiar sense of personal computers, of software and hardware.

Brains are peculiar computational environments, unlike anything humans

have engineered. Neurolinguists like to say that words and their meanings
are “stored” in memory and “retrieved” from memory. And in some sense
they are, just not in the sense of personal computing. When I open a text file
on my computer, I expect it to look exactly the same regardless of other files
and browser tabs open at that time. This is not how information is
“retrieved” in the brain. Some details of the word’s meaning that is activated
will depend on context: The meaning of “tree” that one uses to derive an
interpretation of “I want that tree in our garden,” its nuances and
implications, may differ depending on whether we are looking at a potted
artificial Christmas tree or at a rare olive tree.

The case of “storage” is subtler, more RELATED

intriguing. One idea in What Is the Sound of Thought?

neurolinguistics is that the human
brain is “language ready”: Any infant
can acquire any language on Earth,
while no other animal can. But the
infant brain is not ready for language
in the way a brand new laptop is
ready for Spotify and Zoom, right out
of the box. If one could upload a
language to a newborn’s brain, one
would certainly not magically create a competent, fluent speaker of that
language: The “hardware,” a developing — but still immature — brain, would
not be ready to run the “software,” a full-fledged language. In language
learning, the “software” would have to be programmed in gradually, as a
function of the stage of growth and maturation of the “hardware.” That this
is not how computers and programming work just shows that the software-
vs-hardware metaphor is not quite right for language and the brain.

The future of an idea

Neurolinguists sometimes grumble that we know oh-so-little about

language in the brain, and that there is still much to figure out. True, but
what has been achieved is remarkable, especially in recent times. Accelerated
histories are not uncommon in new fields of science — think of genetics, or
informatics — but they raise questions about the accelerating factors: It is
not always easy to tell real progress from hype. The language-as-calculus
idea has been scrutinized and perfected by philosophers, logicians, linguists,
and computer scientists. How long would a bad idea survive, caught in such
crossfire? It has guided our best theory-building and experimental efforts. It
has been a hard wall to bounce new ideas off against.

Still, there is a risk we take it too far, that we fail to see the difference
between genuine aspects of the language calculus in the brain and what we
can just model mathematically or simulate easily and elegantly “in silico.” No
climate scientist would think a heat wave is a computational process just
because they can simulate it in a computer. For those who study the mind
and brain, making such distinctions is much harder. Where does the
language calculus begin and end? Is it just about syntax, or do we also
compute sound and meaning? And what about the rich experiential
dimension of language? It is perhaps ironic, but ultimately a blessing, that no
calculus, no algorithm, will give us these answers — only clear thinking,
open criticism, and tireless, imaginative research.

Giosuè Baggio is Professor of Psycholinguistics at the Norwegian University of

Science and Technology and the author of “Meaning in the Brain” and
“Neurolinguistics,” on which this article is based.

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