What does it mean to understand language?
Colton Casto, Anna Ivanova, Evelina Fedorenko, Nancy Kanwisher
原文摘要
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 construct mental models of minds, objects, and places, and that compute perceptual and motor representations. Building on earlier theorizing and empirical work, we argue that recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provides both the conceptual foundation and the methods to directly evaluate this hypothesis, thus opening up a new strategy to reveal what it means, cognitively and neurally, to understand language.
cs.CL