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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 16, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Disentangling hierarchical and sequential computations during sentence processing.

Christos-Nikolaos Zacharopoulos¹, Stanislas Dehaene², Yair Lakretz³

¹Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, NeuroSpin Center, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior

|April 14, 2026

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The human brain primarily uses hierarchical processing for sentence comprehension, not simple word-by-word sequences. This structure-based approach dominates language processing, showing distinct neural signatures from sequential computations.

Keywords:

MEG hierarchical computations neural decoding sentence processing subject-verb agreement

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Natural language sentences possess a hierarchical structure crucial for meaning composition.
The human brain's sentence processing may involve both hierarchical and simpler sequential mechanisms.
Non-hierarchical processing can potentially interfere with syntactic structure building, leading to errors.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the neural signatures of hierarchical versus sequential processing during human sentence comprehension.
To determine the relative contribution of hierarchical and sequential computations in the brain.
To explore potential differences in processing non-linguistic sequences versus linguistic sentences.

Main Methods:

Combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) experiment.
Analysis of neural activity during sentence processing.
Comparison of brain responses to hierarchical and sequential structures.

Main Results:

Hierarchical processing significantly dominates over sequential processing in the human brain during sentence comprehension.
Distinct neural signatures were identified for hierarchical and sequential computations.
Linguistic computations are predominantly structure-based and robust to sequential effects.

Conclusions:

The human brain's sentence processing is largely dominated by hierarchical, structure-based computations.
Language processing exhibits distinct neural mechanisms compared to the processing of non-linguistic sequences.
The language system prioritizes syntactic structure, minimizing interference from purely sequential word order.