What is going on in a human brain when one is speaking or trying to comprehend what is being uttered? This fundamental question remained unanswered for many years. However, the last decade has witnessed immensely sophisticated non-invasive techniques for observing brain functions, i.e. functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) etc. These newly developed techniques have gradually been enabling us to recognize, visually, which part of our brain is working when we produce and comprehend utterances. The goals of our COE program in an Integrated Approach to Language, Brain, and Cognition, are twofold: (i) to enhance our accumulated knowledge and expertise in linguistic sciences by employing fMRI techniques, and, more importantly, (ii) to uncover the inner working mechanism of our brain, which has hitherto been treated as a "blackbox".

Inquiry into the relation between brain and language was initially dominated by studies of language disorder such as aphasia. Researchers examined patients with linguistic disability to determine its correlation with damage in a specific brain region. Our enhanced understanding of on-line functions of a lived brain greatly contribute to improvements in rehabilitation therapies for speech disorders. It can also help shed light on how we can prevent age-related speech disorders by training and keeping our brain in good shape, a matter of grave concern in this rapidly aging society.

This fMRI-driven integrated approach to language and brain also benefits foreign language education. Traditionally, linguists based their grammatical and semantic analyses and theories/models on "native speaker intuition". Recent fMRI techniques have presented us with interesting data suggesting that understanding of grammar and that of meaning are performed in different brain regions. A new interdisciplinary field of linguistic science as an experimental science has thus been emerging. If this field develops its full explanatory potentials in the future, it can reveal the differences between the working of a brain as one use one’s native tongue and that as one uses a foreign language, leading to the development of efficient foreign language learning methods much needed in this age of globalization.

Another venue of applying our research findings is implementation of brain mechanism in AI (artificial intelligence), i.e. a robot that can understand language. The day may soon come when welfare robots will be able to provide care and assistance to elderly people with physical disability by responding to their verbal cues.

Language is thus right at the heart of interdisciplinary crossroads where both humanistic sciences (linguistics, psychology) and natural sciences (medicine, information science) meet. Internationally, very few research organizations have attained such interdisciplinary collaboration in linguistic science as our COE. At our COE, a collaborative team of researchers in linguistic science from various subdisciplines at Tohoku University - Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, the New Industry Creation Hatchery Center, Graduate School of Information Sciences, Graduate School of Engineering, Graduate School of Medicine, and Graduate School of Arts and Letters - closely work together to reveal "language in the brain".

With collaboration by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in linguistic science - linguistics at its core, joined by brain scientists, psychologists, information engineering scientists, we form a research and education center and aim to create a new field of research addressing the following issues: (i) How language is represented and organized in a human brain, (ii) How language is acquired, practiced, and lost, and (iii) How language can be acquired by a robot. We take language-related behavior to be uniquely human and aim to train junior researchers in linguistic science of the next generation in our research and education center synthesizing both humanistic and natural sciences.