Yosef Grodzinsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

The language-logic interface in the brain


I will describe a research program that investigates operations in the human brain that pertain to negation. I will present results of experiments that measure the time-course of language understanding, and of others that localize them in the human brain through fMRI. I will use these results to argue that (i) a crucial determinant of cognitive processing cost is the monotonicity of environments, not the number of negative elements they contain; (ii) the neural basis of these cognitive processes lies outside the traditional language regions - located between left Broca's region and reasoning areas. These results suggest a novel cognitive architecture.