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Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language01:10

Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language

Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
Language formation and comprehension take place in the dominant hemisphere. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for understanding the meaning of spoken, written, or sign language, as well as the ability to communicate. For most people, the left hemisphere is the dominant one. The right hemisphere, then, gives tone and emotional context to the...

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Delta-Band Neural Responses to Individual Words Are Modulated by Sentence Processing.

Sophie Slaats1,2, Hugo Weissbart3, Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen3

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands sophie.slaats@mpi.nl.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
|May 23, 2023
PubMed
Summary

Brain responses to words change based on sentence context. Delta-band activity, crucial for language processing, shows words are processed differently within sentences versus word lists.

Keywords:
combinatorial processinglexical processingsentence comprehensionsurprisaltemporal response functionsword frequency

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Understanding how the brain processes language, particularly sentence structure, is a key challenge in neuroscience.
  • Previous research suggests delta-band neural activity plays a role in linguistic structure and meaning representation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how neural responses to words adapt based on their inclusion in a sentence.
  • To determine if low-frequency neural readouts change when words are part of a sentence compared to isolated word lists.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of a magnetoencephalography (MEG) dataset from 102 participants.
  • Utilized temporal response functions and cumulative model-fitting to analyze delta- and theta-band responses.
  • Disentangled responses to lexical information (word frequency) from sensory and distributional variables.

Main Results:

  • Delta-band responses to words are modulated by sentence context in both timing and spatial distribution.
  • Word frequency effects were observed in left temporal and posterior frontal areas, appearing earlier in sentences than word lists.
  • Sentence context influenced the responsiveness of inferior frontal areas to lexical information; theta-band activity showed differences in right frontal areas between conditions.

Conclusions:

  • Low-frequency neural responses to words are significantly altered by sentential context.
  • The neural representation of words is dynamically affected by syntactic structure, providing insights into brain mechanisms of language compositionality.