Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning.
The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, and can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational and neural events. However, we have no continuous and online neural measure of sentence processing with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we report just such a measure: intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain show that neural activity, indexed by γ-power, increases monotonically over the course of a sentence as people read it. This steady increase in activity is absent when people read and remember nonword-lists, despite the higher cognitive demand entailed, ruling out accounts in terms of generic attention, working memory, and cognitive load. Response increases are lower for sentence structure without meaning ("Jabberwocky" sentences) and word meaning without sentence structure (word-lists), showing that this effect is not explained by responses to syntax or word meaning alone. Instead, the full effect is found only for sentences, implicating compositional processes of sentence understanding, a striking and unique feature of human language not shared with animal communication systems. This work opens up new avenues for investigating the sequence of neural events that underlie the construction of linguistic meaning.
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114; evelina.fedorenko@mgh.harvard.edu ngk@mit.edu.
Evelina
E
Fedorenko
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.
Terri L
0000-0001-9205-8581
TL
Scott
National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, NY 12208; Department of Neurology, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY 12208.
Peter
P
Brunner
National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, NY 12208; Department of Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222.
William G
0000-0002-2008-8041
WG
Coon
Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Brianna
B
Pritchett
National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, NY 12208; Department of Neurology, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY 12208; Department of Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222.
Gerwin
0000-0003-3443-9487
G
Schalk
Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 evelina.fedorenko@mgh.harvard.edu ngk@mit.edu.
Nancy
N
Kanwisher
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D004566:Electrodes; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
ECoG; compositionality; language; semantics; syntax
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