Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94288800758 

Speaker: Colton Casto

Affiliation: Fedorenko & Kanwisher

Title: The cerebellar components of the human language network

Abstract: 
The cerebellum’s capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite ample evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its role in linguistic processing remains debated. Here, we undertake a large-scale evaluation of cerebellar language-responsive areas using precision fMRI. We identify four cerebellar regions that respond robustly during language processing across both auditory and written modalities (Experiments 1a-b, n=754). However, only one of these areas—spanning Crus I/II/lobule VIIb—appears to be selective for language relative to diverse motor, perceptual, and cognitive nonlinguistic tasks (Experiments 2a-e, n=776). Similar to the cortical language system, Crus I/II/VIIb supports semantic processing, in both comprehension and production, but it does not support word access or phrase structure building (Experiments 3a-b, n=111). Crus I/II/VIIb is also modulated by some, but not all, of the same sentence-level features that modulate cortical language regions (e.g., grammaticality and frequency; Experiment 3c, n=5). Finally, of the cerebellar language-responsive areas, Crus I/II/VIIb is the most functionally integrated with the cortical language system (Experiment 4, n=85), suggesting that it may receive information from the cortical language network for further semantic processing.