COMPONENTS OF THE LANGUAGE-READY BRAIN EDITED BY : Cedric Boeckx and Antonio Benítez-Burraco PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers Copyright Statement About Frontiers © Copyright 2007-2016 Frontiers Media SA. All rights reserved. Frontiers is more than just an open-access publisher of scholarly articles: it is a pioneering All content included on this site, approach to the world of academia, radically improving the way scholarly research such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, video/audio clips, is managed. The grand vision of Frontiers is a world where all people have an equal downloads, data compilations and software, is the property of or is opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge. Frontiers provides immediate and licensed to Frontiers Media SA permanent online open access to all its publications, but this alone is not enough to (“Frontiers”) or its licensees and/or subcontractors. 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With their The above represents a summary unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers only. For the full conditions see the Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical Conditions for Authors and the Conditions for Website Use. advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers ISSN 1664-8714 Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial ISBN 978-2-88919-893-1 DOI 10.3389/978-2-88919-893-1 Office:[email protected] Frontiers in Psychology 1 July 2016 | Components of the Language-Ready Brain COMPONENTS OF THE LANGUAGE-READY BRAIN Topic Editors: Cedric Boeckx, University of Barcelona & Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Spain Antonio Benítez-Burraco, University of Huelva, Spain This volume highlights new avenues of research in the language sciences, and particularly, in the neurobiology of language. The term “language-ready brain” stresses, on the one hand, the importance of a brain-based description of our species’ linguistic capacity, and, on the other, the need to appreciate the crucial role culture plays in shaping the linguistic systems children acquire and adults use. For this reason, the focus is not put on language per se, but on our learning biases and cognitive pre-dispositions toward language. Both brain and culture are considered at two crucial levels of inquiry: phylogeny and ontogeny. In a fast-growing field like the language sciences and specifically, language evolution studies, this book has tried to capture several of the most exciting topics explored currently, sowing seeds for future investigations. Citation: Boeckx, C., Benítez-Burraco, A., eds. (2016). Components of the Language-Ready Brain. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88919-893-1 Frontiers in Psychology 2 July 2016 | Components of the Language-Ready Brain Table of Contents 04 Editorial: Components of the Language-Ready Brain Cedric Boeckx and Antonio Benítez-Burraco Section 1: Genetics 05 Retinoic Acid Signaling: A New Piece in the Spoken Language Puzzle Jon-Ruben van Rhijn and Sonja C. Vernes Section 2: The brain 13 Merge in the Human Brain: A Sub-Region Based Functional Investigation in the Left Pars Opercularis Emiliano Zaccarella and Angela D. Friederici 22 ‘Syntactic Perturbation’ During Production Activates the Right IFG, but not Broca’s Area or the ATL William Matchin and Gregory Hickok 36 Brain asymmetry in the white matter making and globularity Constantina Theofanopoulou 49 Corrigendum: Brain asymmetry in the white matter making and globularity Constantina Theofanopoulou 50 The brain dynamics of linguistic computation Elliot Murphy Section 3: Development 69 The “Globularization Hypothesis” of the Language-ready Brain as a Developmental Frame for Prosodic Bootstrapping Theories of Language Acquisition Aritz Irurtzun 76 Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development Ruth de Diego-Balaguer, Anna Martinez-Alvarez and Ferran Pons Section 4: Evolution 91 Can a bird brain do phonology? Bridget D. Samuels 101 Evolution of speech-specific cognitive adaptations Bart de Boer 105 Why language really is not a communication system: a cognitive view of language evolution Anne C. Reboul 117 Brain readiness and the nature of language Denis Bouchard Frontiers in Psychology 3 July 2016 | Components of the Language-Ready Brain EDITORIAL published: 23 May 2016 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00762 Editorial: Components of the Language-Ready Brain Cedric Boeckx 1* and Antonio Benítez-Burraco 2 1 Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA)/Department of General Linguistics, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 2 Department of Philology and its Didactics, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain Keywords: language, language development, evolution, neurolinguistics, evolutionary biology The Editorial on the Research Topic Components of the Language-Ready Brain Our intention in putting together this volume was to exemplify and highlight new avenues of research in the language sciences concerning the neurobiology of language. We chose the term “language-ready brain” for our Research Topic, like we did for Boeckx and Benitez-Burraco, because we think it is high time to stress, on the one hand, the importance of a brain-based description of our species’ linguistic capacity, and, on the other, the need to appreciate the crucial role culture plays in shaping the linguistic systems children acquire and adults use. In this sense, the focus of neurobiological investigations should not be “language,” but our learning biases and cognitive pre-dispositions toward language (i.e., “language-readiness”). Both brain and culture considerations ought to shape research at all levels of inquiry: phylogeny and ontogeny. The contributions to this research topic break new grounds, by either revisiting long-standing issues (such as the role of Broca’s region, the relevance of lateralization, the evolutionary origins of phonology, the role of basic cognitive and perceptive abilities in language acquisition, or the functions performed by language), or by examining closely issues that we are sure will rise to prominence in the near future (like the translational models of language processing into specific patterns of brain oscillations or the nature of the gene networks in which known “language genes” are found integrated). Taken together, the papers collected here shed light on language at the level of the genetics (van Rhijn and Vernes), brain connectivity (Murphy; Theofanopoulou), and physiology (Matchin and Hickok; Zaccarella and Friederici), cognition (de Boer; de Diego-Balaguer Edited and reviewed by: et al.), and behavior