Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core language system is fundamentally limited, deeply understanding language requires exporting information from the language system to other brain regions that compute perceptual and motor representations, construct mental models, and store our world knowledge and autobiographical memories. We review the existing evidence for this hypothesis, and argue that recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provides both the conceptual foundation and the methods to directly test it, thus opening up a new strategy to reveal what it means, cognitively and neurally, to understand language.

翻译：语言理解不仅涉及提取语言输入的表层意义，更在于构建其所描述情境的丰富心理模型。本文提出，由于大脑核心语言系统的处理能力存在根本性局限，深度理解语言需要将信息从语言系统输出至其他脑区，这些脑区负责计算感知与运动表征、构建心理模型，并存储我们的世界知识与自传体记忆。我们回顾了支持该假说的现有证据，并指出认知神经科学的最新进展既提供了概念基础，也提供了直接验证该假说的方法，从而开辟了一条揭示语言理解在认知与神经层面内涵的新路径。