The functional neuroanatomy of serial order in language

•Identify how brain areas in Broca's region play distinct roles in linearization.•Decompose linearization into a series of distinct sub-operations.•Provide mappings of this decomposition to the decomposition of Broca's area.•Formulate linking hypotheses between linguistic theory and neuroscience.

The paper aims to shed light on how serial order is computed in the human mind/brain, focusing on the nature of linearization in language. Linearization is here understood as the mapping of hierarchical syntactic structures onto linear strings. We take as our point of departure the now well-established need to subdivide Broca's region into different areas, and claim that these brain areas play important and distinct roles in the context of linearization. Crucially, for this mapping to be valid, linearization must be decomposed into a series of distinct (generic) sub-operations. Thus, the present work highlights the benefit of decomposing Broca's area and the linearization algorithm in parallel to formulate linking hypotheses between mind and brain.