EDITORIAL
published: 16 December 2014
doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00436

BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE

Language and Cognition
Leonid Perlovsky 1* and Kuniyoshi L. Sakai 2*
1

Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Department of Basic Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan*Correspondence: lperl@rcn.com; sakai@mind.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
2

Edited and reviewed by:
Nuno Sousa, University of Minho, Portugal
Keywords: language, cognition, brain, functional imaging, emotion

Interaction between language and cognition remains an unsolved
scientific problem. What are the differences in neural mechanismsof language and cognition? Why do children acquire language by
the age of six, while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is
the role of language and cognition in thinking? Is abstract cognition possible without language? Is language just a communication
device, or is it fundamental in developing thoughts? Why are there
no animals with human thinking but without human language?
Combinations even among 100 words and 100 objects (multiplewords can represent multiple objects) exceed the number of all theparticles in the Universe, and it seems that no amount of experience would suffice to learn these associations. How does humanbrain overcome this difficulty?
Since the nineteenth century we know about involvement ofBroca’s and Wernicke’s areas in language. What new knowledge
about the brain regions responsible for language and cognition
has been found with fMRI and other brain imaging methods?
Every year we know more about their anatomical and functional/effective connectivity. What can be inferred about theirinteractions and functions in language and cognition? Why does
the human brain show hemispheric (i.e., left or right) dominancefor some specific linguistic and cognitive processes? Is linguistic
and cognitive comprehension processed in the same or different regions? Do the syntactic processes affect the structure of ourconceptual world?
Such issues regarding brain functions and mind have been
increasingly drawing attention from various fields in recent years,
and investigations that go beyond the boundaries of previous
fields of study are becoming necessary. The need for study spanning the brain and the mind has given birth to a new discipline,
such as cognitive neuroscience, neurolinguistics, biolinguistics,etc. We assume that mind is a part of brain function, and we tentatively define the mind as a combination of three main cognitive
factors: perception, memory, and consciousness. Language is created by mind, yet, once uttered, words return to the mind, where
they are understood. The cycle from the mind to the language andthen from the language to the mind, is recursive, in that the language produced by the mind comes back to the mind once again.
This recursiveness is important when considering the relationshipbetween language and mind.
When viewed language and mind as a whole system, it is evident that the functions of language are part of the brain systemat the same time as being involved in the workings of the mind.
Moreover, information is exchanged between language and each

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscienceof perception, memory, and consciousness in both directions.
Namely, language is involved in both reciprocal and recursive
information exchange with each element of the mind. Since language is tightly linked to the mind, it would be more natural toassume that language is a part of the mind than to think it is anentity which exits outside the mind. The study of language is, inessence, to understand a part of the “human” mind. The more we
study the language used by humans, the more we will understandthe structure of the mind.
Chomsky has suggested that language is separable from cognition (Berwick et al., 2013), and this notion has been well supported by functional imaging experiments in neuroscience (Sakai,2005). On the opposite, cognitive and construction linguistics
emphasized a single mechanism of both. Neither has led to a computational theory so far, but language is learned early in life with
only limited cognitive understanding of the world (Perlovsky,2009). Evolutionary linguistics has emphasized evolution leading
to a mechanism of language acquisition, yet proposed approaches
also lead to incomputable complexity. Papers in this volume
report new knowledge on interacting language and cognition, still
there remains more questions than answers.
In animals, emotional and conceptual contents of voice sounds
are fused. Evolution of human language has demanded splittingof emotional and conceptual contents, as well as of their mechanisms, although language prosody still carries emotional content.
Is it a dying-off remnant, or is it fundamental for interaction
between language and cognition? If language and cognitive mechanisms differ, unifying these two contents requires motivation,hence emotions. What are these emotions? Can they be measured?
If tonal languages use pitch contours for semantic contents, arethere differences in language-cognition interaction among tonal
and atonal languages? Are emotional differences among cultures
exclusively cultural, or also depend on languages?
This volume introduces a broad range of research addressing these topics, including three opinion articles, one hypothesis
and theory article, eight original research articles, and a pairof an opinion article and a general commentary article. Theirsummaries are as follows.
First, Perlovsky (2013) introduces joint acquisition, dual hierarchy, and emotional prosody of language and cognition, suchthat emotional prosody may perform a fundamental function
in connecting sounds and meanings of words. Vicario (2013)
discusses about FOXP2 gene and language development, whichmight inform us about the origin of language. Perry and Lupyan

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December 2014 | Volume 8 | Article 436 | 1

Perlovsky and Sakai

Language and Cognition(2013) explain that language and thought are different but
strongly interacting abilities, based on the online manipulationof linguistic activity.
Next, Ohta et al. (2013) propose computational principles ofsyntax in the regions specialized for language, thereby integrating
theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging. Nagels et al.
(2013b) present an fMRI study on the neural substrates of figurative language during natural speech perception. De La Cruz et al.
(2013) show that finger counting helps cognitive robots to learn
words. Straube et al. (2013) suggest that abstract information
conveyed by speech and gesture may be processed independent ofmodality. Tilles and Fontanari (2013) examine reinforcement andinference in cross-situational word learning. Nagels et al. (2013a)
indicate the role of semantic abstractness and perceptual category
in processing speech accompanied by gestures. Zhong et al. (2013)
study a self-organizing pre-symbolic neural model representing
sensorimotor information. Shuai and Gong (2013) analyze temporal relationships between top-down and bottom-up processing
in lexical tone perception. Vicario and Rumiati (2013) demonstrate how notions of left and right affect processing of trading
verbs.
We end the volume with a highly-popular discussion on therole of open access publications in linguistics, contributed byHaspelmath (2013) and Bragazzi (2013).

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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could beconstrued as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 13 November 2014; accepted: 01 December 2014; published online: 16
December 2014.
Citation: Perlovsky L and Sakai KL (2014) Language and Cognition. Front. Behav.
Neurosci. 8:436. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00436
This article was submitted to the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Copyright © 2014 Perlovsky and Sakai. This is an open-access article distributedunder the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s)or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, inaccordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction ispermitted which does not comply with these terms.

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