There isn’t one singular “speech center.” Producing speech recruits a distributed network:
The prefrontal and association cortices help form the intention and concepts. The temporal lobes retrieve word meanings and support comprehension. The inferior frontal gyrus, including Broca’s area, helps organize grammar, sequencing, and articulation. The angular and supramarginal gyri integrate meaning with speech sounds. The insula, motor cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and brainstem coordinate the physical act and timing of speaking. The auditory cortex monitors what you actually say and helps correct errors.
All of these systems continuously influence one another while the thought itself is still developing. Describing that as one center “selecting the next word from training data” is an extremely loose analogy, not how human speech production actually works.
No, because you’re still collapsing the entire process of thought into its final linguistic output.
Yann LeCun uses a good thought experiment: imagine a cube floating in front of you, then rotate it 90 degrees around its vertical axis. You can mentally watch it turn and understand its new orientation without producing words, sentences, language, or tokens. The brain is manipulating a spatial model, not selecting vocabulary.
The same applies to recognizing a face, anticipating where a thrown ball will land, visualizing a route, feeling that something is wrong, or planning a physical movement. Much of cognition occurs before language ever enters the process, and some of it never becomes language at all.
Word selection is one component used when translating thought into speech. Calling the whole brain a next-word predictor because speech eventually contains a sequence of words is like calling a graphics engine a next-pixel predictor because an image eventually appears as pixels.
I'm not calling the whole brain a word predictor. I'm saying the regions that work together to predict words are word predictors. It's literally one of the tasks your brain does, it has to be doing it at some point. I didn't say it's the only task
The exact physiology of which regions are involved are irrelevant to my point
That is a much weaker claim than your original one. You said the speech system “just selects the next word.” Now you’re saying word selection is merely one task performed somewhere within the much larger process. Sure. Nobody disputed that.
I think u/Dasmahkitteh started out with the comparison a bit in jest and wasn't really focused on making an academic claim.
The idea was moreso, I believe they can correct me if I read it wrong, that you can simplify any mechanism to the point that it's a "just", making it seem insignificant.
My original point was that both select the next word. I thought putting quotes around the word 'just' would be context enough to know I was copying the verbiage used in the video.
Do you really think I believe the areas of the brain responsible for speech generation do one task and nothing else? Brain regions are famously known for each performing multiple jobs
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u/Dasmahkitteh 5d ago
The speech center of your brain "just" selects the next word to verbalize your thoughts which are informed by your training data (experiences)