title: Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech.
abstract: The most critical attribute of human language is its unbounded combinatorial nature: smaller elements can be combined into larger structures on the basis of a grammatical system, resulting in a hierarchy of linguistic units, such as words, phrases and sentences. Mentally parsing and representing such structures, however, poses challenges for speech comprehension. In speech, hierarchical linguistic structures do not have boundaries that are clearly defined by acoustic cues and must therefore be internally and incrementally constructed during comprehension. We found that, during listening to connected speech, cortical activity of different timescales concurrently tracked the time course of abstract linguistic structures at different hierarchical levels, such as words, phrases and sentences. Notably, the neural tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures was dissociated from the encoding of acoustic cues and from the predictability of incoming words. Our results indicate that a hierarchy of neural processing timescales underlies grammar-based internal construction of hierarchical linguistic structure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA.|College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
authors.forename: Nai
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, New York, USA.|Department of Neurophysiology, Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany.|Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.
authors.forename: Lucia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Melloni
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA.|Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.|PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China.|Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Hang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA.|New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China.|NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Xing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA.|Neuroscience Department, Max-Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Poeppel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D000069280:Electrocorticography / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult