PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Mariya Toneva
AU  - Tom M. Mitchell
AU  - Leila Wehbe
TI  - The meaning that emerges from combining words is robustly localizable in space but not in time
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.28.316935
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.28.316935
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/29/2020.09.28.316935.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/29/2020.09.28.316935.full
AB  - To study a core component of human intelligence—our ability to combine the meaning of words—neuroscientists look for neural correlates of meaning composition, such as brain activity proportional to the difficulty of understanding a sentence. However, little is known about the product of meaning composition in the brain—the combined meaning of words beyond their individual meaning. We term this product “supra-word meaning” and devise a computational representation for it by using recent neural network algorithms and a new technique to disentangle composed-from individual-word meaning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that supra-word meaning is processed in the bilateral anterior and posterior temporal lobes. Surprisingly, we cannot detect supra-word meaning in magnetoencephalography. These results suggest that composed meaning is maintained through a different neural mechanism that does not consist of synchronized cell firing. This difference in sensitivity has implications for past neuroimaging results and future neuroimaging studies.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.