Brain mechanisms of language acquisition and understanding

Abstract

In this paper, we propose three hypotheses about language understanding. One of the fundamental and important components of language processing is assignment of a thematic role to each word in a sentence, based on word order and particles or prepositions. Therefore, we first discuss the brain mechanism of thematic role assignment, followed by a discussion of the brain mechanism for outlining the meaning of a sentence. We then evaluate the function of the mirror neuron system in language understanding. Finally, we discuss the brain mechanisms of mental perspective shift and hierarchical processing in language comprehension.