Brain teasers in language research

Parrots are the only species besides humans that can talk. They're also the only other species that can keep a basic beat while listening to a simple bit of music. So is there a connection between the ability to keep rhythm and to form language?

This is one of the many intriguing theories of Gregory Hickok's work. A Distinguished Professor of cognitive sciences and language science, Hickok has a new book scheduled for November release, Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language - which has been 25 years in the making because the discipline has grown and changed so quickly.

"Looking back at the amount of work and the progress that's been made in the field, by me and others, and putting it together is incredible," says Hickok, chair of the Department of Language Science.

Every time he was ready to share, there would be another discovery that shook things up and required more research and more grants to figure out. Over the past 20 years, Hickok has received more than $16 million in National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funding to study language systems in the brain and how abnormalities affect speech after a stroke, head injury or degenerative disease.

"Language is a complicated system made up of many parts," he says. "Because we're so good at it, we think it's simple. It's very hard. AI chatbots seem to do it well, but it takes massive computing power to build these large language models - essentially gobbling up the whole internet."

Research to understand the brain's architecture when it comes to language helps determine how the systems work and how they break down after damage. That has practical uses in developing better assessment tools so speech pathologists can target therapy as well as giving neurosurgeons more information as they try to remove tumors or treat epilepsy.

One of the interesting recent developments in Hickok's work might help explain why only humans and parrots can move to a beat. "We identified two separate hierarchies involved in speaking: one that deals with articulating sounds and the other involving prosody, the sing-song part of language," Hickok says. "Parrots also can talk and appear to have two neural control systems for their vocalizations. Perhaps the need to coordinate these two systems led to the evolution of rhythmic synchronization to sound."

It's easy to imagine this kind of link when thinking about songs children learn to help them memorize something - such as state names in alphabetical order. Decades later, that ditty often remains stuck in an adult's brain.

Using rhythm and timing to try to get someone's speech back during therapy might bring positive outcomes. "Maybe the problem is something has gone awry with the rhythm system," Hickok says, adding that if the two systems aren't synced, things are misaligned. "Those systems need a conductor."

All that research relies on federal funding, and Hickok is "100 percent concerned" about the future of those grants. "Everyone is," he says. "There's no existing entity that could take this over because it's not aimed at treatments or a marketable product in the short term. It has application, but it takes more time to develop products than any commercial entity would be willing to wait."

During the research journey, a unique opportunity arose. Hickok and his team discovered a zone at the back of the left side of the brain that would light up in response to listening to speech as well as during speaking. In the lab, they informally called it "the spot," as in "Did the spot light up with this subject too?" They decided to officially name it the Sylvian parietal-temporal area: the SPT.

"You don't always get to name an area of the brain," Hickok says, "and I got to name one."

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