how Tool use and language skills are linked in the brain – and practising one improves the other?

Language has traditionally been considered a complex skill which mobilizes brain networks specifically dedicated to linguistic processing. But in recent years, neuroscience research has returned to this idea and offered new insights. Notably, studies have suggested that areas of the brain which control certain language functions, such as processing the meaning of words, are also involved in the control of fine motor skills. Syntax, the ability to correctly structure words into a sentence, is one of the most important features of language. While evidence had yet to link syntax skills specifically with motor control in the brain, research published in 2019 revealed a correlation between having good syntactic ability and being skilled at using tools. With this in mind, our international research team was interested to know whether the use of tools engages parts of the brain similar to those mobilized when we’re thinking about the construction of sentences. Email Twitter19 Facebook92 LinkedIn Print Language has traditionally been considered a complex skill which mobilises brain networks specifically dedicated to linguistic processing. But in recent years, neuroscience research has returned to this idea and offered new insights. Notably, studies have suggested that areas of the brain which control certain language functions, such as processing the meaning of words, are also involved in the control of fine motor skills. Syntax, the ability to correctly structure words into a sentence, is one of the most important features of language. While evidence had yet to link syntax skills specifically with motor control in the brain, research published in 2019 revealed a correlation between having good syntactic ability and being skilled at using tools. With this in mind, our international research team was interested to know whether the use of tools engages parts of the brain similar to those mobilized when we’re thinking about the construction of sentences. The Conversation provides fair, evidence-based coverage. We need your support to keep going. We invited participants (244 across a series of experiments) to perform tests consisting of motor training and syntax exercises in French. Our new findings, published in the journal Science, show that these two skills do engage the same region of the brain. We also found motor training with a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences, and vice versa. For the motor training, we asked participants to use mechanical pliers to insert small pegs into different holes. In the syntax exercise, participants were shown sentences such as “The scientist who admires the poet writes an article” or similar sentences with more complex syntax like “The scientist whom the poet admires writes an article”. They then had to judge statements such as “The poet admires the scientist” as being true or false. For the first part of our analysis, we used brain imaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI) to identify the brain networks activated during each task. We observed that the motor training and the syntactic exercises activated common areas of the brain in a region called the basal ganglia. The two tasks activated these common parts of the brain in similar ways (for example, we observed similar distribution of the activation).