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Cortical-striatal-cortical neural circuits, reiteration, and the “narrow faculty of language”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Philip Lieberman
Philip Lieberman
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1978. Philip_Lieberman@brown.edu
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Abstract

Neural circuits linking local operations in the cortex and the basal ganglia confer reiterative capacities, expressed in seemingly unrelated human traits such as speech, syntax, adaptive actions to changing circumstances, dancing, and music. Reiteration allows the formation of a potentially unbounded number of sentences from a finite set of syntactic processes, obviating the need for the hypothetical “Narrow Faculty of Language.”

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 527 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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