Amazing stuff!
"... New research ... has identified specific language-processing regions in the cerebellum that closely mirror regions in the frontal and temporal lobes of the neocortex, the brain areas long understood as the specialized epicenter for processing language.
“We’ve identified a specific region of the cerebellum that closely mirrors the neocortex, which fundamentally changes how we understand the neural architecture of language,” ... “There is a region in the brain that is being ignored by language researchers that is potentially really important.” ...
Some regions of the neocortex are so specialized for language that they are only used when processing language, and not, for example, when someone does a math problem or listens to non-verbal music. Now, ... have identified a region in the cerebellum that, like those selective regions of the neocortex, responds exclusively to language inputs and processing. The researchers identified several additional regions in the cerebellum that have “mixed selectivity,” meaning they are used in language processing as well as non-language tasks, such as visual perception and movement. ..."
From the highlights and abstract:
"Highlights
• Four regions in the right posterior cerebellum reliably respond to language
• One region—“LangCereb3,” spanning Crus I/II/VIIb—is highly selective for language
• The other regions exhibit mixed selectivity, responding to non-linguistic inputs
• All regions, but especially LangCereb3, mirror the neocortical language network
Summary
Despite ample evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. We systematically characterize cerebellar language-responsive regions using precision fMRI.
We identify four cerebellar regions that respond to language across modalities (experiments 1a and 1b, n = 754).
One region—spanning Crus I/II/lobule VIIb—is selective for language relative to diverse non-linguistic tasks (experiments 2a–2f, n = 732), and the rest exhibit mixed selectivity.
Similar to the neocortical language system, the language-selective region is engaged during comprehension and production (experiments 3a and 3b, n = 100), shows sensitivity to linguistic difficulty (experiment 3c, n = 5), and responds to both social and nonsocial sentences (experiment 3d, n = 10).
Finally, all four regions, but especially Crus I/II/VIIb, are functionally connected to the neocortical language system (experiment 4, n = 85).
We propose that these cerebellar regions constitute components of the extended language network, with one region closely mirroring the neocortical network and the rest plausibly integrating information from diverse neocortical regions."
The Cerebellum Takes the Stage, Playing a New Role - Kempner Institute "New research from Harvard’s Kempner Institute offers insights into the cerebellum’s important role in language processing"
Graphical abstract
