Delta-band neural responses to individual words are modulated by sentence processing

Human language is unprecedented in its combinatorial capacity: we are capable of producing and understanding sentences we have never heard before. Although the mechanisms underlying this capacity have been thoroughly described in formal linguistics, how they are implemented in the brain remains to a large extent unknown. A large body of recent work from the cognitive neuroscientific literature implies a role for delta-band neural activity in the representation of linguistic structure and meaning. In this work, we combine these insights and techniques with findings from psycholinguistics to show that meaning is more than the sum of its parts: the delta-band MEG signal differentially reflects lexical information in- and outside of sentence structures.

The original data can be found here: https://data.donders.ru.nl/collections/di/dccn/DSC_3011020.09_236?0

人类语言在组合能力上具有无与伦比的特征：我们能够产出并理解未曾听闻过的句子。尽管支撑这一能力的机制已在形式语言学中得到详尽阐述，但在大脑中如何实现这一机制在很大程度上仍是个未解之谜。大量最新的认知神经科学文献研究表明，delta频段神经活动在语言结构和意义的表征中扮演着一定角色。在本研究中，我们将这些洞见与技术结合，并与心理语言学的研究成果相结合，旨在证明意义并非其组成部分的简单叠加：delta频段的脑磁图（MEG）信号差异性地反映了句子结构内外词汇信息的变化。