RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.04.08.031575
DO 10.1101/2020.04.08.031575
A1 Alessandro Tavano
A1 Stefan Blohm
A1 Christine Knoop
A1 R Muralikrishnan
A1 Mathias Scharinger
A1 Valentin Wagner
A1 Dominik Thiele
A1 Oded Ghitza
A1 Nai Ding
A1 Winfried Menninghaus
A1 David Poeppel
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/08/2020.04.08.031575.abstract
AB 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.