ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Hierarchy processing in human neurobiology: how specific is it?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Atypical structural connectivity of language networks in autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analysis of diffusion tensor imaging studies.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2022Pooled it
- Linking GABAergic and Dopaminergic Neurotransmission: Effects on Neural Activity During Human Speech Control.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Does nonsense make sense? A springboard to studying dynamic reconfiguration of large-scale networks during semantic and intonation speech processing.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Fixel-Based White Matter Correlates of Sentence Comprehension in Post-Stroke Aphasia.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Speech and music recruit frequency-specific distributed and overlapping cortical networks.eLife · 2024Article
- Mapping sentence comprehension and syntactic complexity: evidence from 131 stroke survivors.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation on the Left Posterior Inferior Frontal Gyrus Perturbs Complex Syntactic Processing Stability in Mandarin Chinese.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Respective Involvement of the Right Cerebellar Crus I and II in Syntactic and Semantic Processing for Comprehension of Language.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2023Article
- Children's syntax is supported by the maturation of BA44 at 4 years, but of the posterior STS at 3 years of age.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Origins of Hierarchical Logical Reasoning.Cognitive science · 2023Article
- Exploring the neurobiology of Merge at a basic level: insights from a novel artificial grammar paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music: a bottom-up perspective.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Review
- Hierarchical syntactic processing is beyond mere associating: Functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence from a novel artificial grammar.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Infants' neural speech discrimination predicts individual differences in grammar ability at 6 years of age and their risk of developing speech-language disorders.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- The Language Network Is Recruited but Not Required for Nonverbal Event Semantics.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2021Article
- Evolution of regulatory signatures in primate cortical neurons at cell-type resolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Broca's Area Is Not a Natural Kind.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2020Review
- What can animal communication teach us about human language?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Crossing the Rubicon: Behaviorism, Language, and Evolutionary Continuity.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
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Abstract
Although human and non-human animals share a number of perceptual and cognitive abilities, they differ in their ability to process hierarchically structured sequences. This becomes most evident in the human capacity to process natural language characterized by structural hierarchies. This capacity is neuroanatomically grounded in the posterior part of left Broca's area (Brodmann area (BA) 44), located in the inferior frontal gyrus, and its dorsal white matter fibre connection to the temporal cortex. Within this neural network, BA 44 itself subserves hierarchy building and the strength of its connection to the temporal cortex correlates with the processing of syntactically complex sentences. Whether these brain structures are also relevant for other human cognitive abilities is a current debate. Here, this question will be evaluated with respect to those human cognitive abilities that are assumed to require hierarchy building, such as music, mathematics and Theory of Mind. Rather than supporting a domain-general view, the data indicate domain-selective neural networks as the neurobiological basis for processing hierarchy in different cognitive domains. Recent cross-species white matter comparisons suggest that particular connections within the networks may make the crucial difference in the brain structure of human and non-human primates, thereby enabling cognitive functions specific to humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'What can animal communication teach us about human language?'
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