Towards Understanding Sustained Neural Activity Across Syntactic Dependencies.

Sustained anterior negativities have been the focus of much neurolinguistics research concerned with the language-memory interface, but what neural computations do they actually reflect? During the comprehension of sentences with long-distance dependencies between elements (such as object -questions), prior event-related potential work has demonstrated sustained anterior negativities (SANs) across the dependency region. SANs have been traditionally interpreted as an index of working memory resources responsible for storing the first element (e.g.

Parallel processing in speech perception with local and global representations of linguistic context.

Speech processing is highly incremental. It is widely accepted that human listeners continuously use the linguistic context to anticipate upcoming concepts, words, and phonemes. However, previous evidence supports two seemingly contradictory models of how a predictive context is integrated with the bottom-up sensory input: Classic psycholinguistic paradigms suggest a two-stage process, in which acoustic input initially leads to local, context-independent representations, which are then quickly integrated with contextual constraints.