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Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing
Open accessAbstract
Significance: According to most linguists, the syntactic structure of sentences involves a tree-like hierarchy of nested phrases, as in the sentence [happy linguists] [draw [a diagram]]. Here, we searched for the neural implementation of this hypothetical construct. Epileptic patients volunteered to perform a language task while implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical purposes. While patients read sentences one word at a time, neural activation in left-hemisphere language areas increased with each successive word but decreased suddenly whenever words could be merged into a phrase. This may be the neural footprint of “merge,” a fundamental tree-building operation that has been hypothesized to allow for the recursive properties of human language.
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“While word-yoked gamma power was explained using computational models that estimated forward-entropy and word-surprisal, (similar to Willems et al., 2016), grammatically motivated predictions derived from a phrase-structure parser provided the best fit to gamma fluctuations.”
From Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension (2018) · cites this paper as Nelson et al., 2017
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“They documented a gradual increase in high-gamma power during single word reading of sentences, which decreased at points where words could be merged into a constituent phrase.”
From Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension (2018) · cites this paper as Nelson et al. (2017)
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“The fact that the degree to which prior context constrains future complements appears to mediate both Gamma (Nelson et al., 2017) and alpha (Rommers et al., 2017) activity suggests their interplay is crucial, and that coupled changes in alpha and gamma power may be a signature of efficient forward-looking predictions.”
From Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension (2018) · cites this paper as Nelson et al., 2017
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Metadata
- Authors
- Nelson, M. J., El Karoui, I., Giber, K., Yang, X., Cohen, L., Koopman, H., Cash, S. S., Naccache, L., Hale, J. T., Pallier, C., & Dehaene, S.
- Affiliations
- Inserm (FR)
- Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) U1127, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) UMR7225, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) Paris 6, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière Research Center (ICM), 75013 Paris, France;
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114;
- Stanford University (US)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-04-17
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 18
- Pages
- E3669-E3678
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5422821
- OpenAlex
- W2606837722
- Cited by
- 319
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 25 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 41 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 39 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 29 · 2017: 13
- FWCI
- 16.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- EC | European Research Council (NeuroSyntax)
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (140301)
- AXA Research Fund (Doctoral Fellowship)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Keywords
- sentence processing, phrase structure, syntactic analysis, Merge operation, high-gamma power, superior temporal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, bottom-up parsing, intracranial recordings
- MeSH terms
- Brain, Female, Frontal Lobe, Humans, Male, Models, Neurological, Speech, Temporal Lobe
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