Language statistics as a window into mental representations

Large-scale linguistic data is nowadays available in abundance. Here, we demonstrate that the surface-level statistical structure of language alone opens a window into how our brain represents the world. To this end, we examine the statistical occurrence of words referring to body parts in very different languages, covering nearly 4 billions of native speakers. Our findings indicate that the human body as extracted from language resembles the distorted human-like figure known as the sensory homunculus, whose form depicts the amount of cortical area dedicated to somatosensory functions of each body part. This links the way conceptual knowledge is represented and communicated in language to how the brain processes information from the sensory systems.