@article {Ding742585, author = {Nai Ding and Peiqing Jin}, title = {Low-frequency Neural Activity Reflects Rule-based Chunking during Speech Listening}, elocation-id = {742585}, year = {2019}, doi = {10.1101/742585}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {Cortical activity tracks the rhythms of phrases and sentences during speech comprehension, which has been taken as strong evidence that the brain groups words into multi-word chunks. It has prominently been argued, in contrast, that the tracking phenomenon could be explained as the neural tracking of word properties. Here we distinguish these two hypotheses based on novel tasks in which we dissociate word properties from the chunk structure of a sequence. Two tasks separately require listeners to group semantically similar or semantically dissimilar words into chunks. We demonstrate that neural activity actively tracks task-related chunks rather than passively reflecting word properties. Furthermore, without an explicit {\textquoteleft}chunk processing task,{\textquoteright} neural activity barely tracks chunks defined by semantic similarity - but continues to robustly track syntactically well-formed meaningful sentences. These results suggest that cortical activity tracks multi-word chunks constructed by either long-term syntactic rules or temporary task-related rules. The properties of individual words are likely to contribute only in a minor way, contrary to recent claims.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/21/742585}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/21/742585.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }