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Does Broca's play by the rules?

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Languages may all share and be constrained by a universal grammar. A new study shows that Broca's area (long thought to participate in grammatical aspects of language) becomes increasingly active as participants acquire rules from a foreign language, but not as they acquire comparable rules that are inconsistent with real languages. Could Broca's area be a neural substrate for universal grammar?

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Figure 1: The grammars of human languages consist of hierarchically defined relations (illustrated here with three examples of a simple sentence) suggesting that an innate 'universal grammar' may constrain the form that human languages can take.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Gary F Marcus

  2. Dept. of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, V6T 1Z4, BC, Canada

    Athena Vouloumanos

  3. Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Ivan A Sag

Authors
  1. Gary F Marcus
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  2. Athena Vouloumanos
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  3. Ivan A Sag
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Correspondence to Gary F Marcus.

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Marcus, G., Vouloumanos, A. & Sag, I. Does Broca's play by the rules?. Nat Neurosci 6, 651–652 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0703-651

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