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Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality

View ORCID ProfileAlessandro Tavano, Stefan Blohm, Christine Knoop, R Muralikrishnan, View ORCID ProfileMathias Scharinger, Valentin Wagner, View ORCID ProfileDominik Thiele, Oded Ghitza, Nai Ding, Winfried Menninghaus, David Poeppel
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031575
Alessandro Tavano
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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  • For correspondence: alessandro.tavano@ae.mpg.de
Stefan Blohm
2Department of Language and Literature, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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Christine Knoop
2Department of Language and Literature, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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R Muralikrishnan
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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Mathias Scharinger
2Department of Language and Literature, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
3University of Marburg, 35037 – Marburg, Germany
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Valentin Wagner
2Department of Language and Literature, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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Dominik Thiele
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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Oded Ghitza
4Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, 02215 - Boston, USA
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Nai Ding
5College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, 310027 - Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
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Winfried Menninghaus
2Department of Language and Literature, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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David Poeppel
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322 - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
6Department of Psychology, New York University, 10003 - New York City, New York, USA
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Abstract

Can neural activity reveal syntactic structure building processes and their violations? To verify this, we recorded electroencephalographic and behavioral data as participants discriminated concatenated isochronous sentence chains containing only grammatical sentences (regular trials) from those containing ungrammatical sentences (irregular trials). We found that the repetition of abstract syntactic categories generates a harmonic structure of their period independently of stimulus rate, thereby separating endogenous from exogenous neural rhythms. Behavioral analyses confirmed this dissociation. Internal neural harmonics extracted from regular trials predicted participants’ grammatical sensitivity better than harmonics extracted from irregular trials, suggesting a direct reflection of grammatical sensitivity. Instead, entraining to external stimulus rate scaled with task sensitivity only when extracted from irregular trials, reflecting attention-capture processing. Neural harmonics to repeated syntactic categories constitute the first behaviorally relevant, purely internal index of syntactic competence.

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Posted April 08, 2020.
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Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality
Alessandro Tavano, Stefan Blohm, Christine Knoop, R Muralikrishnan, Mathias Scharinger, Valentin Wagner, Dominik Thiele, Oded Ghitza, Nai Ding, Winfried Menninghaus, David Poeppel
bioRxiv 2020.04.08.031575; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031575
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Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality
Alessandro Tavano, Stefan Blohm, Christine Knoop, R Muralikrishnan, Mathias Scharinger, Valentin Wagner, Dominik Thiele, Oded Ghitza, Nai Ding, Winfried Menninghaus, David Poeppel
bioRxiv 2020.04.08.031575; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031575

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