The DOI matches its Crossref record; 65 of the 65 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“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)
In the citing paper
“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
In the citing paper
“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
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Chomsky, N. (1957) · doi:10.1515/9783112316009 · Cited by 7,885
A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex
Glasser, M. F., Coalson, T. S., Robinson, E. C., Hacker, C. D., Harwell, J., Yacoub, E., Ugurbil, K., Andersson, J., Beckmann, C. F., Jenkinson, M., et al. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature18933 · Cited by 5,111
Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
Michel, J.-B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., The Google Books Team, Pickett, J. P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., et al. (2010) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1199644 · Cited by 3,235
A cortical network for semantics: (de)constructing the N400
Lau, E. F., Phillips, C., & Poeppel, D. (2008) · Nature reviews. Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn2532 · Cited by 1,779
On Broca, brain, and binding: A new framework
Hagoort, P. (2005) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.07.004 · Cited by 1,411
Chomsky, N. (2013) · Lingua · doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.12.003 · Cited by 1,284
Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech
Ding, N., Melloni, L., Zhang, H., Tian, X., & Poeppel, D. (2016) · Nature Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nn.4186 · Cited by 1,059
Different Origins of Gamma Rhythm and High-Gamma Activity in Macaque Visual Cortex
Ray, S., & Maunsell, J. H. R. (2011) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000610 · Cited by 1,012
Phonetic Feature Encoding in Human Superior Temporal Gyrus
Mesgarani, N., Cheung, C., Johnson, K., & Chang, E. F. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1245994 · Cited by 993
A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain
Eliasmith, C., Stewart, T. C., Choo, X., Bekolay, T., DeWolf, T., Tang, Y., & Rasmussen, D. (2012) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1225266 · Cited by 973
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- JA Fodor, TG Bever, MF Garrett The Psychology of Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Generative Grammar (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974).
- P Smolensky, G Legendre The Harmonic Mind: Cognitive Architecture (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006).
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Discovering Event Structure in Continuous Narrative Perception and Memory
Baldassano, C., Chen, J., Zadbood, A., Pillow, J. W., Hasson, U., & Norman, K. A. (2017) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.041 · Cited by 952
What you can cram into a single $&!#* vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties
Conneau, A., Kruszewski, G., Lample, G., Barrault, L., & Baroni, M. (2018) · Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/p18-1198 · Cited by 657
The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing
Schrimpf, M., Blank, I. A., Tuckute, G., Kauf, C., Hosseini, E. A., Kanwisher, N., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Fedorenko, E. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2105646118 · Cited by 517
The Cortical Organization of Syntax
Matchin, W., & Hickok, G. (2020) · Cerebral Cortex · doi:10.1093/cercor/bhz180 · Cited by 370
A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension
Heilbron, M., Armeni, K., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hagoort, P., & de Lange, F. P. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2201968119 · Cited by 343
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
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
