What does it mean to understand language?
This work addresses a foundational issue in cognitive neuroscience by offering a new hypothesis for how language understanding occurs in the brain, potentially influencing research in AI and psychology.
The paper tackles the problem of defining language understanding by proposing that it requires constructing mental models beyond surface-level meaning, and suggests that this involves exporting information from the brain's language system to other regions for deeper processing.
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.