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.

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