Language articles from across Nature Portfolio

Many brain areas support complex language processing behaviours. In this Review, Fedorenko et al. disentangle the ‘core’ language system as functionally distinct from the perceptual and motor brain areas and knowledge and reasoning systems it closely interacts with during language comprehension and production.

In the McGurk effect, seeing the talker’s face changes perception of auditory speech. Repeatedly experiencing the effect produces long-lasting changes in auditory perception, so that the McGurk fusion percept is evoked even without seeing the face.

Here, using neural activity patterns in the inferior frontal gyrus and large language modeling embeddings, the authors provide evidence for a common neural code for language processing.

Megan Majocha is gearing up to complete her PhD. But developing a sign-language lexicon to help her succeed took an immense toll during her scientific research.

A neural network that taught itself to recognize objects using the filmed experiences of a single infant could offer new insights into how humans learn.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Genomic data from ancient humans who lived up to 7,400 years ago, sampled from across California and Mexico, unveil patterns of migration that could explain how some Indigenous languages spread in parts of North America.