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Autori principali: Casto, Colton, Ivanova, Anna, Fedorenko, Evelina, Kanwisher, Nancy
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
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author Casto, Colton
Ivanova, Anna
Fedorenko, Evelina
Kanwisher, Nancy
author_facet Casto, Colton
Ivanova, Anna
Fedorenko, Evelina
Kanwisher, Nancy
contents Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core language system is fundamentally limited, deeply understanding language requires exporting information from the language system to other brain regions that compute perceptual and motor representations, construct mental models, and store our world knowledge and autobiographical memories. We review the existing evidence for this hypothesis, and argue that recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provides both the conceptual foundation and the methods to directly test it, thus opening up a new strategy to reveal what it means, cognitively and neurally, to understand language.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19757
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What does it mean to understand language?
Casto, Colton
Ivanova, Anna
Fedorenko, Evelina
Kanwisher, Nancy
Computation and Language
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core language system is fundamentally limited, deeply understanding language requires exporting information from the language system to other brain regions that compute perceptual and motor representations, construct mental models, and store our world knowledge and autobiographical memories. We review the existing evidence for this hypothesis, and argue that recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provides both the conceptual foundation and the methods to directly test it, thus opening up a new strategy to reveal what it means, cognitively and neurally, to understand language.
title What does it mean to understand language?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757