{"doi":"10.1162/nol_e_00152","title":"Small but Mighty: Ten Myths and Misunderstandings About the Cerebellum","abstract":"This special issue of Neurobiology of Language focuses on the role of the cerebellum in spoken and written language comprehension and production. The volume brings together behavioral and neural evidence bearing upon this question using an array of methods. As editors, we are excited by the collective impact of this work, which includes recent findings from many of the leading researchers who study the cerebellum and language. We also find ourselves pondering the term “special” as a reflection of the widespread tendency of brain researchers to comfortably relegate the cerebellum to a minor role in cognition. As a result, our 21st century understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of the cerebellum is not yet consistently recognized by the field, leading to an underappreciation of the cerebellar contributions to language beyond its role in the coordination of articulation. Here we offer a “top ten” list aimed at countering some of the myths and misunderstandings that keep it out of the limelight.The name of the cerebellum—Latin for “little brain”—is a good starting point for considering ways in which the cerebellum is underestimated. It is true that the cerebellum is volumetrically smaller than the cerebrum. However, with over 50 billion neurons it has more than twice as many neurons as the cerebral cortex (von Bartheld et al., 2016). Given that neurons are often regarded as the basic computing unit of the brain, this fact alone leads us to ask, “How could a structure with more than half the human brain’s neurons not have achieved star status?” Further, the lateral cerebellar hemispheres have expanded along with association regions of the cerebral cortex (Herculano-Houzel, 2010), indicating that these two brain systems evolved together. Indeed, this was one of the factors that led Leiner et al. (1986) to posit a role for the cerebellum in cognitive functions. This comparative neurology perspective has been a sufficient argument to link, for example, the prefrontal cortex to human cognition; we suggest that the same should be true for the cerebellum.Many of the activation maps of cognitive terms in the Neurosynth database (https://neurosynth.org/) contain cerebellar clusters with significance values rivalling those of cerebral cortical clusters. Unfortunately, cerebellar findings often receive little discussion or are ignored entirely beyond inclusion in a table reporting significant foci. As to why this is the case, we proffer our personal experience of hearing comments such as, “We see the cerebellum all the time, but we just don’t know what to say about it,” a theme of inscrutability that has been echoed by cerebellar researchers themselves. Open questions of course remain, but that is true for every brain region. We see no reason to believe that the cerebellum should be far less understood, or much harder to understand, than Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the visual word form area, the angular gyrus, anterior temporal pole, or other brain regions commonly associated with speech and language processing.One clear point is that the cerebellar and cerebral cortices have fundamentally distinct cytoarchitectures that undoubtedly endow them with differing computational capacities. The cytoarchitecture of the cerebellar cortex involves three (not six) layers, variations in its organization are revealed most readily by molecular markers rather than differences in neuronal composition, its principal output is inhibitory rather than excitatory and involves a neuron (the Purkinje cell) found only in the cerebellum, and the basic computational circuit of the cerebellum, the microzone, diverges in organization from the columns of the cerebral cortex (Apps & Hawkes, 2009). These variations in circuitry and neurotransmitter systems alter the neurovascular coupling that is the foundation for functional neuroimaging (Diedrichsen et al., 2010) and underlie differences in the basic representational structure of the cerebellum. For instance, th","journal":"Neurobiology of Language","year":2024,"id":468498,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.956,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":228123,"name":"Catherine J. Stoodley","orcid":"0000-0003-2629-0213","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":572566,"name":"Julie A. Fiez","orcid":"0000-0003-1090-2481","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":36,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:05:23.500722Z","pmid":"39175784","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}