Paper Info
Title
How the brain makes sense beyond the processing of single words - An MEG study.
Abstract
Human language processing involves combinatorial operations that make human communication stand out in the animal kingdom. These operations rely on a dynamic interplay between the inferior frontal and the posterior temporal cortices. Using source reconstructed magnetoencephalography, we tracked language processing in the brain, in order to investigate how individual words are interpreted when part of sentence context. The large sample size in this study (n = 68) allowed us to assess how event-related activity is associated across distinct cortical areas, by means of inter-areal co-modulation within an individual. We showed that, within 500 ms of seeing a word, the word's lexical information has been retrieved and unified with the sentence context. This does not happen in a strictly feed-forward manner, but by means of co-modulation between the left posterior temporal cortex (LPTC) and left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC), for each individual word. The co-modulation of LIFC and LPTC occurs around 400 ms after the onset of each word, across the progression of a sentence. Moreover, these core language areas are supported early on by the attentional network. The results provide a detailed description of the temporal orchestration related to single word processing in the context of ongoing language.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.035
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
MEG,Word processing,Sentence progression,Unification,Fronto-temporal interaction
Left posterior,Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Core language,Human communication,Orchestration (computing),Sentence,Magnetoencephalography,Language processing in the brain,Word processing
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
186
1053-8119
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
11
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Annika Hultén1183.21
Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen278453.76
Julia Uddén341.15
Nietzsche H L Lam400.34
Peter Hagoort530466.52