I have mixed feelings about this paper (17 page PDF). On the one hand, the turning point for my efforts to learn French can when I began to apply frames to what I was trying to say (so I could decide things like tense and gender once and then not worry about it). On the other hand, I think of fMRI as a modern form of phrenology. What I can derive from this is the idea that language learning isn't just about language. As the authors put it, "a deep understanding of language... requires the exportation of information from the brain's core language system to other cognitive and neural systems that can build models." It's not, they say, that the whole brain is responsible for language processing, it's just that language processing depends on (shall we say) other systems that have multiple uses.
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