Together, these findings provide one of the clearest views yet of the brain’s microscopic “language circuitry.” Rather than language emerging from a single language center, it appears to arise from vast networks of specialized neurons working together across multiple scales—from individual cells, to local neural populations, to entire brain regions.

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.