PolyU 85th Anniversary: FH-UBSN Joint Distinguished Lecture: The Brain’s Infrastructure for Human Uniqueness

Abstract
Language is a central feature of human uniqueness. Undeniably members of the species homo sapiens produce and understand speech, and many of them are able to read and write. They do this in very different varieties.  The sound repertoires of the more than 7000 languages that are still around today vary widely, as do their grammatical structures, and the meanings that their lexical items code for. For instance, some languages have a sound repertoire of only a dozen phonemes, whereas others have more than a hundred; some languages make semantic distinctions in one domain, others in another domain. Further, sign languages are expressed by movements of hands and face, whereas spoken languages are expressed by movements of the vocal tract. It is equally undeniabe that the human brain provides the shared neurobiological infrastructure for our language skills. This infrastructure requires the contribution of multiple neural networks, some more specialized for language than others. In addition, there is substantial neural plasticity that enables the accomodation of language variation and individual variation in language skills. I will discuss the brain’s infrastructure for this uniquely human capacity from a multiple networks perspective. Moreover I will show how language influences other cognitive systems, such as perception and action. This is what I have called the enlanguagement of the brain. Finally I will sketch relevant consequences for technological solutions of human-machine interactions.

About the speaker
Peter Hagoort is director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (since November 2006), and the founding director of the Donders Institute, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN, 1999), a cognitive neuroscience research centre at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In addition, he is professor in cognitive neuroscience at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His own research interests relate to the domain of the human language faculty and how it is instantiated in the brain. In his research he applies neuroimaging techniques such as ERP, MEG, PET and fMRI to investigate the language system and its impairments as in aphasia, dyslexia and autism. Hagoort is a recipient of the Spinoza Prize and the Heymans Prize. He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy, the Academia Europaea, and the US National Academy of Sciences.