Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Word meanings and sentence structure recruit the same set of fronto-temporal regions during comprehension

Evelina Fedorenko, Zachary Mineroff, Matthew Siegelman, Idan Blank
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/477851
Evelina Fedorenko
1Department of Psychiatry, MGH, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
2Department of Psychiatry, HMS, Boston, MA 02115, USA
3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences / McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Zachary Mineroff
3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences / McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Matthew Siegelman
3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences / McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Idan Blank
3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences / McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

To understand what you are reading now, your mind retrieves the meanings of words from a linguistic knowledge store (lexico-semantic processing) and identifies the relationships among them to construct a complex meaning (syntactic or combinatorial processing). Do these two sets of processes rely on distinct, specialized mechanisms or, rather, share a common pool of resources? Linguistic theorizing and empirical evidence from language acquisition and processing have yielded a picture whereby lexico-semantic and syntactic processing are deeply inter-connected. In contrast, most current proposals of the neural architecture of language continue to endorse a view whereby certain brain regions selectively support lexico-semantic storage/processing whereas others selectively support syntactic/combinatorial storage/processing, despite inconsistent evidence for this division of linguistic labor across brain regions. Here, we searched for a dissociation between lexico-semantic and syntactic processing using a powerful individual-subjects fMRI approach across three sentence comprehension paradigms (n=49 participants total): responses to lexico-semantic vs. syntactic violations (Experiment 1); recovery from neural suppression across pairs of sentences differing in lexical items vs. syntactic structure (Experiment 2); and same/different meaning judgments on such sentence pairs (Experiment 3). Across experiments, both lexico-semantic and syntactic conditions elicited robust responses throughout the language network. Critically, no regions were more strongly engaged by syntactic than lexico-semantic processing, although some regions showed the opposite pattern. Thus, contra many current proposals of the neural architecture of language, lexico-semantic and syntactic/combinatorial processing are not separable at the level of brain regions – or even voxel subsets – within the language network, in line with strong integration between these two processes that has been consistently observed in behavioral language research. The results further suggest that the language network may be generally more strongly concerned with meaning than structure, in line with the primary function of language – to share meanings across minds.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted November 24, 2018.
Download PDF
Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Word meanings and sentence structure recruit the same set of fronto-temporal regions during comprehension
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Word meanings and sentence structure recruit the same set of fronto-temporal regions during comprehension
Evelina Fedorenko, Zachary Mineroff, Matthew Siegelman, Idan Blank
bioRxiv 477851; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/477851
Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Word meanings and sentence structure recruit the same set of fronto-temporal regions during comprehension
Evelina Fedorenko, Zachary Mineroff, Matthew Siegelman, Idan Blank
bioRxiv 477851; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/477851

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Neuroscience
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (4091)
  • Biochemistry (8773)
  • Bioengineering (6487)
  • Bioinformatics (23356)
  • Biophysics (11758)
  • Cancer Biology (9155)
  • Cell Biology (13257)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (7418)
  • Ecology (11376)
  • Epidemiology (2066)
  • Evolutionary Biology (15095)
  • Genetics (10404)
  • Genomics (14014)
  • Immunology (9126)
  • Microbiology (22071)
  • Molecular Biology (8783)
  • Neuroscience (47396)
  • Paleontology (350)
  • Pathology (1421)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2482)
  • Physiology (3705)
  • Plant Biology (8055)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1433)
  • Synthetic Biology (2211)
  • Systems Biology (6017)
  • Zoology (1250)