Offloading to the Basal Ganglia?

Interesting article this week in Scientific American about the skills of the "expert mind". The basic conclusion is that what "experts" do better or have at their disposal is the ability to manipulate more information because they have chunked it.

Scientific American: The Expert Mind [ PSYCHOLOGY AND BRAIN SCIENCE ]
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

With regard to language, I have two thoughts:
1) Though the article doesn't discuss it, this appears to align with Namhee Lee's work on the basal ganglia for procedural learning.
2) For language learning, it makes pattern finding/acquisition all the more important. It also may implicate "contextual ensembles" in which learners chunk contextual information along with linguistic information. For example, I recently called a friend overseas and her father picked up the phone. I have rarely, if ever, had to speak to another person's father in Russian. It's not that my Russian is grossly inadequate so much as the "chunks" for the sociopragmatics of that interaction were not available, making it REALLY awkward.