Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2016-10, Vol.113 (41), p.E6256-E6262
• Main Authors: Fedorenko, Evelina, Scott, Terri L., Brunner, Peter, Coon, William G., Pritchett, Brianna, Schalk, Gerwin, Kanwisher, Nancy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal communication; Animal memory; Biological Sciences; Brain; Cognition & reasoning; Linguistics; Listening comprehension; Memory; Neurons; PNAS Plus; Social Sciences; Syntax
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1612132113

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.