The cerebellar components of the human language network

Abstract The cerebellum’s capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite now ample evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role in language processing remains debated. Here, we systematically characterize cerebellar language-responsive regions using precision fMRI. We identify four cerebellar regions that respond to language across modalities (Experiments 1a-b, n=754). One region—spanning Crus I/II/lobule VIIb—is selective for language relative to diverse non-linguistic perceptual, cognitive, and motor tasks (Experiments 2a-f, n=732), and the rest exhibit mixed-selective profiles, responding strongly to language but also to one or more of the non-linguistic conditions. Similar to the neocortical language system, the language-selective region is engaged by sentence-level meanings during comprehension and production (Experiments 3a-b, n=100) and shows fine-grained sensitivity to linguistic processing difficulty (Experiment 3c, n=5). Further, this region’s response to language is not due to the frequent presence of social content in language, as it is strongly engaged by both social and nonsocial sentences (Experiment 3d, n=10). Finally, all four regions, but especially Crus I/II/VIIb, are functionally connected to the neocortical language system (Experiment 4, n=85). We propose that these cerebellar regions constitute components of the extended language network, with one region supporting linguistic semantic processing and closely mirroring the selectivity of the neocortical language network, and the other three plausibly integrating information from diverse neocortical regions.