Abstract
An evolutionary account of human language as a neurobiological system must distinguish between human-unique neurocognitive processes supporting language and evolutionarily conserved, domain-general processes that can be traced back to our primate ancestors. Neuroimaging studies across species may determine whether candidate neural processes are supported by homologous, functionally conserved brain areas or by different neurobiological substrates. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging in Rhesus macaques and humans to examine the brain regions involved in processing the ordering relationships between auditory nonsense words in rule-based sequences. We find that key regions in the human ventral frontal and opercular cortex have functional counterparts in the monkey brain. These regions are also known to be associated with initial stages of human syntactic processing. This study raises the possibility that certain ventral frontal neural systems, which play a significant role in language function in modern humans, originally evolved to support domain-general abilities involved in sequence processing.
Highlights
An evolutionary account of human language as a neurobiological system must distinguish between human-unique neurocognitive processes supporting language and evolutionarily conserved, domain-general processes that can be traced back to our primate ancestors
Since non-human animals lack human language abilities, the results of this comparative human and monkey functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment inform us on the domain-general processes, not specific to language, which macaques and humans both possess and whose neural substrates are identified
Our human fMRI results link to the larger body of evidence that the frontal opercular cortex is associated with certain forms of human language processing and domain-general processes, as we consider
Summary
An evolutionary account of human language as a neurobiological system must distinguish between human-unique neurocognitive processes supporting language and evolutionarily conserved, domain-general processes that can be traced back to our primate ancestors. This study raises the possibility that certain ventral frontal neural systems, which play a significant role in language function in modern humans, originally evolved to support domain-general abilities involved in sequence processing. Human neuroimaging experiments have led to the development of a number of neurobiological models of language processing[4,5,6] and hypotheses about the evolution of the brain areas that support these functions[2,4,7,8,9] Testing such evolutionary hypotheses requires evidence from cross-species functional imaging studies, using paradigms that can both evaluate abilities present in human and non-human animals and which are known to engage language-related processes in the human brain. These results raise the possibility that language-critical processes in modern humans are functionally integrated with an ancestral, domain-general system that is involved in sequence processing
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