ReviewNature2024
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.
Review in Nature, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- What is so hard about abstract words, anyways? A neuromechanistic explanation using brain-constrained neural network models.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2026Article
- Review
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The cerebellum specializes for language even in the absence of contralateral neocortical inputs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Temporally structured motor and auditory representations in covert syllable production.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Domain-general and language-specific brain networks are differentially associated with verbal intelligence during development.iScience · 2026Article
- A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of 1199 human brains doing arbitrary tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neurotechnological Natives and the Neurotechnology Shift: A Research Agenda for the Brain-as-Interface Era.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- Trimodal, uncertainty-guided whole-slide framework for genome-scale spatial expression and image-only virtual perturbation in cancer cohorts.Genome medicine · 2026Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Reply to Hu: Reasoning traces need not be faithful to account for the cost of human thinking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Functional dissociation of language and theory of mind in the developing superior temporal lobe.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Right hemisphere language network plasticity in aphasia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Rethinking the Origins of Cross-Language Effects: How Heard Verbs Influence Japanese- and English-Speaking Children's Attention to the Details of Actions.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Convergent and Divergent Connectivity Patterns of the Arcuate Fasciculus in Macaques and Humans.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Transcriptomics and functional genomics implicate WNT3 in hemispheric lateralization of speech production.iScience · 2026Article
- IoT-LLM: A framework for enhancing large language model reasoning from real-world sensor data.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.
Indexed as
Identifiers
38898296What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.