Linguistics and human brain: a perspective of computational neuroscience

Abstract Elucidating the language–brain relationship requires bridging the methodological gap between linguistics’ abstract theoretical frameworks and neuroscience’s empirical neural data. As an interdisciplinary cornerstone, computational neuroscience formalizes language’s hierarchical and dynamic structures into testable neural representation models through modeling, simulation, and data analysis, enabling computational dialogue between linguistic hypotheses and neural mechanisms. Recent advances in deep learning, particularly large language models (LLMs), have further advanced this inquiry: their high-dimensional representational spaces provide a new scale for probing the neural basis of linguistic processing, the model–brain alignment framework offers a principled approach to evaluating the biological plausibility of language-related theories, provided that representational correspondence is interpreted together with behavioral, temporal, causal, and biological constraints. This review synthesizes interdisciplinary progress from a computational neuroscience perspective. First, it outlines the core connotations of major linguistic frameworks (generative grammar, functional linguistics, and cognitive linguistics), their cross-cultural and evolutionary characteristics, and key challenges for neural alignment, including limited quantitative mechanisms, poor accessibility of abstract constructs to neural measures, and insufficient treatment of dynamics and plasticity. Second, it introduces the methodological foundations of linguistics–neuroscience dialogue, focusing on four technical pillars: neural activity measurement (e.g., fMRI, EEG, MEG, fNIRS, ECoG, SEEG), linguistic numerical representation, the evolution of language models from statistical approaches to LLMs, and neural coding frameworks that link model representations to brain signals, illustrated with a model–brain alignment case study. Third, it summarizes major findings, ranging from early computational insights into predictability and structural processing to recent LLM-driven progress in cross-modal interaction, inter-brain coupling, hierarchical computation, learning strategy sensitivity, and language plasticity. Finally, the review discusses current limitations–including functional alignment without structural homology, constraints on real-time validation, biased research coverage, and narrow evaluation metrics–and proposes future directions, such as exploring whether spiking neural network–based language models can improve biological plausibility in settings requiring temporally precise and event-driven neural modeling, developing cognitive-level alignment frameworks integrating memory, causality, and metacognition, and extending clinical applications. In summary, this work aims to advance a comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of the language-brain relationship and promote computational neuroscience as a generative theoretical framework for testable neuro-computational accounts of language.