Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Language and Cognition

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.

Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language

Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language

Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
Language formation and comprehension take place in the dominant hemisphere. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for understanding the meaning of spoken, written, or sign language, as well as the ability to communicate. For most people, the left hemisphere is the dominant one. The right hemisphere, then, gives tone and emotional context to the...

Language Development

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...

Lateralization

Lateralization

Brain lateralization refers to the division of mental processes and functions between the two hemispheres of the brain, a phenomenon that optimizes neural efficiency and underpins complex abilities in humans. This specialization allows each hemisphere to perform tasks where it has a comparative advantage, facilitating more refined cognitive capabilities across different domains.

Components of Language

Components of Language

Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026

Same author

You can't fight in here! This is BBS!

The Behavioral and brain sciences·2026

Same author

The language network responds robustly to sentences across tasks.

Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)·2026

Same author

The extended language network: Language-responsive brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience·2026

Same author

Higher visual areas act like domain-general filters with strong selectivity and functional specialization.

Nature communications·2026

Same author

Stresses and fluid flow in lamina cribrosa through anisotropic poroelasticity.

ArXiv·2026

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 8, 2025

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Published on: April 28, 2016

Incremental Language Comprehension Difficulty Predicts Activity in the Language Network but Not the Multiple Demand

Leila Wehbe¹, Idan Asher Blank^2,3, Cory Shain⁴

¹Carnegie Mellon University, Machine Learning Department PA 15213, USA.

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

|April 25, 2021

Summary

Domain-general executive functions do not significantly impact language comprehension. Instead, the core language network, not the multiple demand network, shows neural links to comprehension difficulty.

Keywords:

eye-tracking fMRI neural activity psycholinguistic theories self-paced reading

More Related Videos

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Nov 8, 2025

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Published on: April 28, 2016

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Executive functions, including attention and working memory, are hypothesized to play a role in language comprehension.
The multiple demand (MD) network is associated with domain-general cognitive control.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of domain-general executive functions in human language comprehension.
To determine if neural activity in the MD network correlates with language comprehension difficulty.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure neural activity during naturalistic story listening.
Behavioral measures of online comprehension difficulty (reading times, eye-fixation durations) were collected.
Neuroimaging and behavioral data were acquired from nonoverlapping participant samples.

Main Results:

No significant behavioral-neural link was found in the multiple demand (MD) network.
A behavioral-neural link was identified within the domain-specific, fronto-temporal core language network.
This link was observed in both left and right hemispheric language areas.

Conclusions:

Domain-general executive functions are not strongly involved in language comprehension.
The core language network plays a critical role in processing language comprehension difficulty.
Findings challenge theories positing a significant role for executive control in language understanding.