Hippocampal contributions to language use and processing

Abstract

Recent advances in understanding the functionality of the human hippocampus has led to a number of proposals for how hippocampus may support a range of cognitive abilities beyond memory. Building on these advances, we offered a new account of the memory-language interface [Duff and Brown-Schmidt (Front Hum Neurosci 6:69, 2012)]. We proposed that the same processes by which the hippocampal declarative memory system creates and flexibly integrates representations across diverse sources in the formation of new memories, and maintains representations on-line to be evaluated and used in service of behavioral performance, are the same processes necessary for the flexible use and on-line processing of language. This proposal leads to a set of testable predictions and hypotheses about how language and memory work together and argues that efforts to examine the relationship between memory and language are best served by broad-scope approaches that include the study of a range of communicative activities, including those that are characteristic of everyday language use. In this chapter we review the evidence for hippocampal contributions to language use across communicative phenomena (e.g., semantic representation, gesture, perspective-taking) and a range of language related processes (e.g., on-line processing, statistical learning). The present represents a time of tremendous potential for discovery and progress in the study of memory and language and for more representative, biologically plausible, and ecologically valid investigations of memory-and-language-in-use in every-day life.