Words in the Brain's Language: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

    Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:

        WORDS IN THE BRAIN'S LANGUAGE
        
        by Friedemann Pulvermueller 
        
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and
Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal
providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial
current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate.
To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a
BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to:

    bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

      or write to:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of
a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a
commentator. An electronic draft of the full text is available for
inspection with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to
the instructions that follow after the abstract.
___________________________________________________________________

    WORDS IN THE BRAIN'S LANGUAGE
    
    Friedemann Pulvermueller
    Fachgruppe Psychologie
    Universitaet Konstanz
    78434 Konstanz
    Germany
    pumue at uni-tuebingen.de
    
    KEYWORDS:  associative learning, cell assembly, cognition,
    cortex, language, word category

    ABSTRACT: If the cortex is an associative memory, strongly
    connected cell assemblies will form when neurons in different
    cortical areas are frequently active at the same time. The cortical
    distributions of these assemblies must be a consequence of where in
    the cortex correlated neuronal activity occurred during learning.
    An assembly can be considered a functional unit exhibiting activity
    states such as full activation (ignition) after appropriate sensory
    stimulation (possibly related to perception) and continuous
    reverberation of excitation within the assembly (a putative memory
    process).  This has implications for cortical topographies and
    activity dynamics of cell assemblies representing words. Cortical
    topographies of assemblies should be related to aspects of the
    meaning of the words they represent, and physiological signs of
    cell assembly ignition should be followed by possible indicators of
    reverberation. The following postulates are discussed in detail:
    (1) assemblies representing phonological word forms are strongly
    lateralized and distributed over perisylvian cortices;  (2)
    assemblies representing highly abstract words, such as grammatical
    function words, are also strongly lateralized and restricted to
    these perisylvian regions;  (3) assemblies representing concrete
    content words include additional neurons in both hemispheres;  (4)
    assemblies representing words referring to visual stimuli include
    neurons in visual cortices;  (5) assemblies representing words
    referring to actions include neurons in motor cortices. Two main
    sources of evidence are used for evaluating these proposals:  (a)
    imaging studies aiming at localizing word processing in the brain,
    based on stimulus-triggered event-related potentials (ERP),
    positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic
    resonance imaging (fMRI), and  (b) studies of the temporal dynamics
    of fast activity changes in the brain, as revealed by
    high-frequency responses recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG)
    and magnetoencephalogram (MEG).  These data provide evidence for
    processing differences between words and matched meaningless
    pseudowords, and between word classes such as concrete content and
    abstract function words, and words evoking visual or motor
    associations. There is evidence for early word class-specific
    spreading of neuronal activity and for equally specific
    high-frequency responses occurring later. These results support a
    neurobiological model of language in the Hebbian tradition.
    Competing large-scale neuronal theories of language are discussed
    in the light of the summarized data.  A final paragraph addresses
    neurobiological perspectives on the problem of serial order of
    words in syntactic strings.

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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.pulvermueller.html
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.pulvermueller
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.pulvermueller
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
   When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
   yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
   Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.pulvermueller
   When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit