How the brain makes sense beyond the processing of single words – An MEG study

Annika Hultén; Jan Mathijs Schoffelen; Julia Uddén; Nietzsche H.L. Lam; Peter Hagoort

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.035

How the brain makes sense beyond the processing of single words – An MEG study

Annika Hultén^*
, Jan Mathijs Schoffelen
, Julia Uddén
, Nietzsche H.L. Lam
, Peter Hagoort

^*Corresponding author for this work

Not published at Aalto University

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
Radboud University Nijmegen

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review

37 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Human language processing involves combinatorial operations that make human communication stand out in the animal kingdom. These operations rely on a dynamic interplay between the inferior frontal and the posterior temporal cortices. Using source reconstructed magnetoencephalography, we tracked language processing in the brain, in order to investigate how individual words are interpreted when part of sentence context. The large sample size in this study (n = 68) allowed us to assess how event-related activity is associated across distinct cortical areas, by means of inter-areal co-modulation within an individual. We showed that, within 500 ms of seeing a word, the word's lexical information has been retrieved and unified with the sentence context. This does not happen in a strictly feed-forward manner, but by means of co-modulation between the left posterior temporal cortex (LPTC) and left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC), for each individual word. The co-modulation of LIFC and LPTC occurs around 400 ms after the onset of each word, across the progression of a sentence. Moreover, these core language areas are supported early on by the attentional network. The results provide a detailed description of the temporal orchestration related to single word processing in the context of ongoing language.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	586-594
Number of pages	9
Journal	NeuroImage
Volume	186
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.035
Publication status	Published - 1 Feb 2019
MoE publication type	A1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

We are grateful to research assistants Laura Arendsen, Manuela Schuetze, Tineke de Haan, and Charlotte Poulisse for assisting with participant recruitment, stimuli construction and the manual parts of data preprocessing. The researchers were supported by the International Max Planck Research School for Language Science (for N.H.L.L), the Spinoza Prize Award, as well as the Language in Interaction Gravitation grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (for P.H), and the Finnish Academy (grant # 287474 ) to A.H. The data is part of the MOUS (Mother of all Unification Studies) project, which will be made available to the wider research community in the near future. Appendix A

Keywords

Fronto-temporal interaction
MEG
Sentence progression
Unification
Word processing

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10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.035

Cite this

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abstract = "Human language processing involves combinatorial operations that make human communication stand out in the animal kingdom. These operations rely on a dynamic interplay between the inferior frontal and the posterior temporal cortices. Using source reconstructed magnetoencephalography, we tracked language processing in the brain, in order to investigate how individual words are interpreted when part of sentence context. The large sample size in this study (n = 68) allowed us to assess how event-related activity is associated across distinct cortical areas, by means of inter-areal co-modulation within an individual. We showed that, within 500 ms of seeing a word, the word's lexical information has been retrieved and unified with the sentence context. This does not happen in a strictly feed-forward manner, but by means of co-modulation between the left posterior temporal cortex (LPTC) and left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC), for each individual word. The co-modulation of LIFC and LPTC occurs around 400 ms after the onset of each word, across the progression of a sentence. Moreover, these core language areas are supported early on by the attentional network. The results provide a detailed description of the temporal orchestration related to single word processing in the context of ongoing language.",

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How the brain makes sense beyond the processing of single words – An MEG study

Abstract

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Keywords

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