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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
06:34

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Published on: July 1, 2015

Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing.

Matthew J Nelson1, Imen El Karoui2, Kristof Giber3

  • 1Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA), Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) U992, NeuroSpin Center, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France; matthew.nelson.neuro@northwestern.edu stanislas.dehaene@cea.fr.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|April 19, 2017
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

The brain builds complex sentence structures by merging words into phrases, showing neural activity consistent with linguistic merge operations. This research provides intracranial evidence for how the brain processes hierarchical language syntax.

Keywords:
constituentintracranialmergeneurolinguisticsopen nodes

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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Sentences are processed sequentially, but linguistic theories posit hierarchical phrase structures.
  • The neural mechanisms underlying the brain's construction of these syntactic structures are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how brain activity in language-related areas supports the formation of syntactic phrase structures.
  • To explore the neurophysiological basis of the linguistic 'merge' operation.

Main Methods:

  • Used intracranial recordings in humans with word-by-word presentation of sentences and word lists.
  • Analyzed high-gamma power changes in superior temporal and inferior frontal regions.
  • Compared activity patterns against models of phrase construction and sequential probability.

Main Results:

  • High-gamma power increased with words but decreased upon phrase merging in language areas.
  • Brain activity scaled similarly with additional words or multiword phrases, supporting a universal merge operation.
  • Phrase construction models better explained activity than probability-based models in key language cortices.

Conclusions:

  • Provides initial intracranial evidence for the neural reality of the linguistic merge operation.
  • Suggests the brain employs a bottom-up parser to create hierarchical phrase structures from incoming language.
  • Demonstrates how the brain compresses sequential words into nested syntactic hierarchies.