Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input.

Human brains grasp the gists of visual scenes from a single glance, but to what extent is this possible for language? While we typically think of language in terms of sequential speech, our everyday experience involves numerous rapidly flashing written notifications, which we understand instantly. What do our brains detect in the first few hundred milliseconds after seeing such a stimulus? We flashed short sentences during magnetoencephalography measurement, revealing sentence-sensitive neural activity in left temporal cortex within 130 milliseconds. These signals emerged for subject-verb-object sentences regardless of grammatical or semantic well-formedness, suggesting that at-a-glance language comprehension begins by detecting basic phrase structure, independent of meaning or other grammatical details.

Unlocking the complexity of phrasal composition: An interplay between semantic features and linguistic relations.

Understanding the computational operations involved in conceptual composition is fundamental for theories of language. However, the existing literature on this topic remains fragmented, comprising disconnected theories from various fields. For instance, while formal semantic theories in Linguistics rely on type-driven interpretation without explicitly representing the conceptual content of lexical items, neurolinguistic research suggests that the brain is sensitive to conceptual factors during word composition.

The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing during At-a-Glance Reading.

Like all domains of cognition, language processing is affected by top-down knowledge. Classic evidence for this is missing blatant errors in the signal. In sentence comprehension, one instance is failing to notice word order errors, such as transposed words in the middle of a sentence: "you that read wrong" (Mirault et al.

Reactive Inhibitory Control Precedes Overt Stuttering Events.

Research points to neurofunctional differences underlying fluent speech between stutterers and non-stutterers. Considerably less work has focused on processes that underlie stuttered vs. fluent speech.

MEG Evidence That Modality-Independent Conceptual Representations Contain Semantic and Visual Features.

The semantic knowledge stored in our brains can be accessed from different stimulus modalities. For example, a picture of a cat and the word "cat" both engage similar conceptual representations. While existing research has found evidence for modality-independent representations, their content remains unknown.

Introducing MEG-MASC a high-quality magneto-encephalography dataset for evaluating natural speech processing.

The "MEG-MASC" dataset provides a curated set of raw magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of 27 English speakers who listened to two hours of naturalistic stories. Each participant performed two identical sessions, involving listening to four fictional stories from the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) intermixed with random word lists and comprehension questions. We time-stamp the onset and offset of each word and phoneme in the metadata of the recording, and organize the dataset according to the 'Brain Imaging Data Structure' (BIDS).

MEG correlates of speech planning in simple vs. interactive picture naming in children and adults.

The picture naming task is common both as a clinical task and as a method to study the neural bases of speech production in the healthy brain. However, this task is not reflective of most naturally occurring productions, which tend to happen within a context, typically in dialogue in response to someone else's production. How the brain basis of the classic "confrontation picture naming" task compares to the planning of utterances in dialogue is not known.

The time course of cross-modal representations of conceptual categories.

To what extent does language production activate cross-modal conceptual representations? In picture naming, we view specific exemplars of concepts and then name them with a label, like "dog". In overt reading, the written word does not express a specific exemplar. Here we used a decoding approach with magnetoencephalography (MEG) to address whether picture naming and overt word reading involve shared representations of superordinate categories (e.

Conceptual Combination in the LATL With and Without Syntactic Composition.

The relationship among syntactic, semantic, and conceptual processes in language comprehension is a central question to the neurobiology of language. Several studies have suggested that conceptual combination in particular can be localized to the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL), while syntactic processes are more often associated with the posterior temporal lobe or inferior frontal gyrus. However, LATL activity can also correlate with syntactic computations, particularly in narrative comprehension.

Composition within and between Languages in the Bilingual Mind: MEG Evidence from Korean/English Bilinguals.

The ability of the human brain to build complex expressions from simpler parts is fascinating, but the ability of the bilingual brain to do so is perhaps even more remarkable. When highly proficient bilinguals converse, they can fluidly switch from one language to another even inside sentences. Thus, they build expressions using words from more than one language.

Inflection across Categories: Tracking Abstract Morphological Processing in Language Production with MEG.

Coherent language production requires that speakers adapt words to their grammatical contexts. A fundamental challenge in establishing a functional delineation of this process in the brain is that each linguistic process tends to correlate with numerous others. Our work investigated the neural basis of morphological inflection by measuring magnetoencephalography during the planning of inflected and uninflected utterances that varied across several linguistic dimensions.

From letters to composed concepts: A magnetoencephalography study of reading.

Language comprehension requires the recognition of individual words and the combination of their meanings to yield complex concepts or interpretations. This combinatory process often requires the insertion of unstated semantic material between words, based on thematic or feature knowledge. For example, the phrase horse barn is not interpreted as a blend of a horse and a barn, but specifically a barn where horses are kept.

Disentangling Semantic Composition and Semantic Association in the Left Temporal Lobe.

Although composing two words into a complex representation (e.g., "coffee cake") is conceptually different from forming associations between a pair of words (e.

How the conceptual specificity of individual words affects incremental sentence composition: MEG evidence.

While much research has addressed the neural basis of lexical access and the composition of lexical items into larger meanings, little is known about how the semantic properties of individual words affect composition. Research on modifier-noun combinations has, however, shown that composition related activity in the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) is sensitive to the conceptual specificity of the composing words. Here we tested whether this pattern extends to verb-argument combinations in minimal subject-verb-object sentences.

Left posterior temporal cortex is sensitive to syntax within conceptually matched Arabic expressions.

During language comprehension, the brain processes not only word meanings, but also the grammatical structure-the "syntax"-that strings words into phrases and sentences. Yet the neural basis of syntax remains contentious, partly due to the elusiveness of experimental designs that vary structure independently of meaning-related variables. Here, we exploit Arabic's grammatical properties, which enable such a design.

Neural representation of words within phrases: Temporal evolution of color-adjectives and object-nouns during simple composition.

In language, stored semantic representations of lexical items combine into an infinitude of complex expressions. While the neuroscience of composition has begun to mature, we do not yet understand how the stored representations evolve and morph during composition. New decoding techniques allow us to crack open this very hard question: we can train a model to recognize a representation in one context or time-point and assess its accuracy in another.

Lists with and without Syntax: A New Approach to Measuring the Neural Processing of Syntax.

In the neurobiology of syntax, a methodological challenge is to vary syntax while holding semantics constant. Changes in syntactic structure usually correlate with changes in meaning. We approached this challenge from a new angle.

Adaptation to mis-pronounced speech: evidence for a prefrontal-cortex repair mechanism.

Speech is a complex and ambiguous acoustic signal that varies significantly within and across speakers. Despite the processing challenge that such variability poses, humans adapt to systematic variations in pronunciation rapidly. The goal of this study is to uncover the neurobiological bases of the attunement process that enables such fluent comprehension.

Neural Correlates of Modal Displacement and Discourse-Updating under (Un)Certainty.

A hallmark of human thought is the ability to think about not just the actual world but also about alternative ways the world could be. One way to study this contrast is through language. Language has grammatical devices for expressing possibilities and necessities, such as the words or With these devices, called "modal expressions," we can study the actual versus possible contrast in a highly controlled way.

Understanding Requires Tracking: Noise and Knowledge Interact in Bilingual Comprehension.

Understanding speech in noise is a fundamental challenge for speech comprehension. This perceptual demand is amplified in a second language: It is a common experience in bars, train stations, and other noisy environments that degraded signal quality severely compromises second language comprehension. Through a novel design, paired with a carefully selected participant profile, we independently assessed signal-driven and knowledge-driven contributions to the brain bases of first versus second language processing.

Isolating syntax in natural language: MEG evidence for an early contribution of left posterior temporal cortex.

Although the construction of syntactic structures is considered a fundamental component of language processing, insights concerning its neurobiological basis have remained elusive. This may be due, in part, to the inherent difficulty of isolating incremental syntax from other components of language, such as semantic composition. However, while pure manipulations of syntax are challenging to design, natural language grammars do have a sparse set of constructions presenting the possibility.

Neural basis of basic composition: what we have learned from the red-boat studies and their extensions.

Language is our mind's most powerful generative system for the expression of meaning and thought. What are the neural mechanisms of our ability to compose complex meanings from simpler representations? This question is impossible to answer unless we decompose the notion of 'meaning composition' in some theoretically guided way and then begin to assess the extent to which brain activity tracks the posited subroutines. Here, I summarize results from a body of MEG research that has begun to address this question from the ground up, first focusing on simple combinations of two words.

Left occipital and right frontal involvement in syntactic category prediction: MEG evidence from Standard Arabic.

Though recent years have seen a growth in research on predictive processes in language comprehension, their scope and mechanisms remain partially elusive. While mechanisms involved in predicting specific words are relatively well understood, those underlying syntactic prediction are still unclear. In part, this is because of the difficulty in designing experiments that manipulate syntactic predictability while controlling other variables.

The neural basis of combinatory syntax and semantics.

Human language allows us to create an infinitude of ideas from a finite set of basic building blocks. What is the neurobiology of this combinatory system? Research has begun to dissect the neural basis of natural language syntax and semantics by analyzing the basics of meaning composition, such as two-word phrases. This work has revealed a system of composition that involves rapidly peaking activity in the left anterior temporal lobe and later engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex.