title: Cortico-striatal language pathways dynamically adjust for syntactic complexity: A computational study.
abstract: A growing body of literature supports a key role of fronto-striatal circuits in language perception. It is now known that the striatum plays a role in engaging attentional resources and linguistic rule computation while also serving phonological short-term memory capabilities. The ventral semantic and the dorsal phonological stream dichotomy assumed for spoken language processing also seems to play a role in cortico-striatal perception. Based on recent studies that correlate deep Broca-striatal pathways with complex syntax performance, we used a previously developed computational model of frontal-striatal syntax circuits and hypothesized that different parallel language pathways may contribute to canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension separately. We modified and further analyzed a thematic role assignment task and corresponding reservoir computing model of language circuits, as previously developed by Dominey and coworkers. We examined the models performance under various parameter regimes, by influencing how fast the presented language input decays and altering the temporal dynamics of activated word representations. This enabled us to quantify canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension abilities. The modeling results suggest that separate cortico-cortical and cortico-striatal circuits may be recruited differently for processing syntactically more difficult and less complicated sentences. Alternatively, a single circuit would need to dynamically and adaptively adjust to syntactic complexity.
authors: Department of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, University Hospital, Uppsala University, 751 85 Uppsala, Sweden; Computational Neuroscience Group, Wigner Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, Budapest, Hungary. Electronic address: krisztina.szalisznyo@neuro.uu.se.
authors: Krisztina
authors: K
authors: Szalisznyó
authors: Department of Computational Science and Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology; Stockholm Brain Institute, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors: David
authors: D
authors: Silverstein
authors: Department of Neurology, Institut de la mémoire et de la maladie d'Alzheimer, Centre de Référence Démences Rares, Hopital de la Pitié-Salpetriére, AP-HP, Paris, France; Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epiniére (ICM), ICM-INSERM 1127, FrontLab, Paris, France.
authors: Marc
authors: M
authors: Teichmann
authors: Department of Neurosurgery, Gui de Chauliac Hospital, University of Montpellier, Institute for Neurosciences of Montpellier, Montpellier, France.
authors: Hugues
authors: H
authors: Duffau
authors: Department of Neuroscience, Neurology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Rehabilitation, Sahlgrenska Academy, Gothenburg, Institute of Neurosciences and Physiology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
authors: Anja
authors: A
authors: Smits
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009434:Neural Pathways; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Cortico-striatal language network; Reservoir computing; Sentence comprehension; Striatum