Assessing gain modulation as a cortical principle of natural language computation

Recent work in language and computation in neural systems has begun to develop a model of linguistic computation relying on gain modulation, or the process whereby neurons combine multiple sources of information. In this brief article, I will review these proposals and provide two conclusions: First, gain modulation models of language face a number of internal conceptual and empirical difficulties. Second, our current understanding of gain modulation does not support its use as a core component of linguistic computation.