Thalamic and basal ganglia involvement in language-related functions

Words would only be sounds, if they did not activate phonemic and semantic operations in separate cortical regions, and their serial occurrence would remain incomprehensible without integration into a suitable syntactic frame. Coming from this simple notion, two components of biolinguistic processing seem principally relevant, first, the flexible binding of distributed cortical areas to recruit the material for meaningful messages and, second, the structuring of this material according to habitual language features. Based on studies in patients with deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of neurological movement disorders, we propose that thalamic nuclei contribute to the former operation, whereas the basal ganglia rather support the latter aspect of language processing. The current review summarizes DBS-dependent task performances and neurophysiological recordings from thalamic and basal ganglia DBS that target nuclei underlying this view.