title: Experience-Dependent Brain Development as a Key to Understanding the Language System.
abstract: An influential view of the nature of the language system is that of an evolved biological system in which a set of rules is combined with a lexicon that contains the words of the language together with a representation of their context. Alternative views, usually based on connectionist modeling, attempt to explain the structure of language on the basis of complex associative processes. Here, I put forward a third view that stresses experience-dependent structural development of the brain circuits supporting language as a core principle of the organization of the language system. In this view, embodied in a recent neuroconstructivist neural network of past tense development and processing, initial domain-general predispositions enable the development of functionally specialized brain structures through interactions between experience-dependent brain development and statistical learning in a structured environment. Together, these processes shape a biological adult language system that appears to separate into distinct mechanism for processing rules and exceptions, whereas in reality those subsystems co-develop and interact closely. This view puts experience-dependent brain development in response to a specific language environment at the heart of understanding not only language development but adult language processing as well.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University.
authors.forename: Gert
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Westermann
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D008037:Linguistics; D008960:Models, Psychological
keywords: Connectionist modeling; Emergent modularity; English past tense; Experience-dependent brain development; Massive modularity; Neuroconstructivism