ArticleNature communications2026
A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of 1199 human brains doing arbitrary tasks.
Article in Nature communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cascading Periods of Language-Related Brain Plasticity Across Early Childhood.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Cascading periods of language-related brain plasticity across early childhood.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Multiscale neural features of tonal bilingualism: linking regional differences in brain network degree centrality to neurotransmitter-gene signatures in Bai-Mandarin bilinguals.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Neural Cost of Language Processing: Broader Network Recruitment in Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Lesion-Symptom Mapping of Acute Speech Deficits After Left vs. Right Hemisphere Stroke: A Retrospective Analysis of NIHSS Best Language Scores and Clinical Neuroimaging.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- The cerebellar components of the human language network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A two-dimensional space of linguistic representations shared across individuals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- When age tips the balance: A dual mechanism affecting hemispheric specialization for language.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- A 3.5-minute-long reading-based fMRI localizer for the language network.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
- The language network responds robustly to sentences across tasks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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Abstract
A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement about language and its component processes, and (b) intrinsic inter-individual variability in the topography of language areas. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of small numbers of intensively scanned individuals have argued that a language-selective brain network emerges bottom-up from correlations (individualized functional connectomics, iFC) in task-free (e.g., rest) or task-regressed activation timecourses. Here we tested this hypothesis at scale and evaluated its practical utility for task-agnostic language localization: we apply iFC separately to each of 1,957 (fMRI) scanning sessions (1,199 unique brains), each consisting of diverse tasks. We found that iFC indeed revealed a largely left-hemisphere-dominant frontotemporal network that was more stable within individuals than between them, robust to the granularity of the parcellation, and selective for language. These results support the hypothesis that this network is a key structure in the functional organization of the adult brain and show that it can be recovered retrospectively from arbitrary imaging data, with implications for neuroscience, neurosurgery, and neural engineering.
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