Response to Skeide and Friederici: The myth of the uniquely human “direct” dorsal pathway

In their comment on our recent article [1], Skeide and Friederici [2] claim ‘that some important data not discussed by Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al. strongly support the view that there are clear qualitative, and not merely quantitative, differences between [human and nonhuman primate] species with respect to both the intrinsic functional connectivity of frontal and temporal cortices, and their direct structural connection via a dorsal white matter fiber tract.’ This obviously refers to work by Friederici and colleagues [3] emphasizing the functional importance of a direct connection between the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) and Brodmann area (BA) 44 in humans, and its absence i…

Implementation is crucial but must be neurobiologically grounded

Cross-linguistic variation in the neurophysiological response to semantic processing: Evidence from anomalies at the borderline of awareness

The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) has played a major role in the examination of how the human brain processes meaning. For current theories of the N400, classes of semantic inconsistencies which do not elicit N400 effects have proven particularly influential. Semantic anomalies that are difficult to detect are a case in point ("borderline anomalies", e.g. "After an air crash, where should the survivors be buried?"), engendering a late positive ERP response but no N400 effect in English (Sanford, Leuthold, Bohan, & Sanford, 2011). In three auditory ERP experiments, we demonstrate that this result is subject to cross-linguistic variation. In a German version of Sanford and colleagu…

Neurobiological roots of language in primate audition : common computational properties

Here, we present a new perspective on an old question: how does the neurobiology of human language relate to brain systems in nonhuman primates? We argue that higher-order language combinatorics, including sentence and discourse processing, can be situated in a unified, cross-species dorsal-ventral streams architecture for higher auditory processing, and that the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams in higher-order language processing can be grounded in their respective computational properties in primate audition. This view challenges an assumption, common in the cognitive sciences, that a nonhuman primate model forms an inherently inadequate basis for modeling higher-level language…