A Temporal Bottleneck in the Language Comprehension Network

Vagharchakian, Laurianne; Dehaene‐Lambertz, Ghislaine; Pallier, Christophe; Dehaene, Stanislas

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.5685-11.2012

Cited by 101 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…This finding converges with increasing evidence that visuomotor coordination and motor representation are modulated by neurons within the temporal region (Tankus and Fried, 2012) and that cognitive processing speed is associated with temporal cortical structural integrity (Turken et al, 2008). Moreover, some data suggest that higher stages of language processing operate at a fixed speed and could theoretically impose a 'temporal bottleneck' on language functions (Vagharchakian et al, 2012). In this regard, Takeuchi et al, (2011) demonstrated that processing speed training was associated with both structural and functional changes in temporal regions.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Abnormal Resting State fMRI Activity Predicts Processing Speed Deficits in First-Episode Psychosis

Gallego

Robinson

Ikuta

et al. 2015

Neuropsychopharmacol

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Little is known regarding the neuropsychological significance of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) activity early in the course of psychosis. Moreover, no studies have used different approaches for analysis of rs-fMRI activity and examined gray matter thickness in the same cohort. In this study, 41 patients experiencing a first-episode of psychosis (including N ¼ 17 who were antipsychotic drug-naive at the time of scanning) and 41 individually age-and sex-matched healthy volunteers completed rs-fMRI and structural MRI exams and neuropsychological assessments. We computed correlation matrices for 266 regions-of-interest across the brain to assess global connectivity. In addition, independent component analysis (ICA) was used to assess group differences in the expression of rs-fMRI activity within 20 predefined publicly available templates. Patients demonstrated lower overall rs-fMRI global connectivity compared with healthy volunteers without associated group differences in gray matter thickness assessed within the same regions-of-interest used in this analysis. Similarly, ICA revealed worse rs-fMRI expression scores across all 20 networks in patients compared with healthy volunteers, with posthoc analyses revealing significant (po0.05; corrected) abnormalities within the caudate nucleus and planum temporale. Worse processing speed correlated significantly with overall lower global connectivity using the region-of-interest approach and lower expression scores within the planum temporale using ICA. Our findings implicate dysfunction in rs-fMRI activity in first-episode psychosis prior to extensive antipsychotic treatment using different analytic approaches (in the absence of concomitant gray matter structural differences) that predict processing speed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Abnormal Resting State fMRI Activity Predicts Processing Speed Deficits in First-Episode Psychosis

Gallego

Robinson

Ikuta

et al. 2015

Neuropsychopharmacol

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“…Altogether, the putative representation of open nodes was mostly confined to classical areas of the sentence-processing network identified with fMRI (14,15), namely the STS, IFG, dorsal precentral/prefrontal cortex in the vicinity of area 55b (37), and the dorsomedial surface of the frontal lobe. A previous fMRI study suggested that this area may maintain a linguistic buffer (38), which is consistent with a representation of open nodes.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing

Nelson

Karoui

Giber

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

258

250

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Although sentences unfold sequentially, one word at a time, most linguistic theories propose that their underlying syntactic structure involves a tree of nested phrases rather than a linear sequence of words. Whether and how the brain builds such structures, however, remains largely unknown. Here, we used human intracranial recordings and visual word-by-word presentation of sentences and word lists to investigate how left-hemispheric brain activity varies during the formation of phrase structures. In a broad set of language-related areas, comprising multiple superior temporal and inferior frontal sites, high-gamma power increased with each successive word in a sentence but decreased suddenly whenever words could be merged into a phrase. Regression analyses showed that each additional word or multiword phrase contributed a similar amount of additional brain activity, providing evidence for a merge operation that applies equally to linguistic objects of arbitrary complexity. More superficial models of language, based solely on sequential transition probability over lexical and syntactic categories, only captured activity in the posterior middle temporal gyrus. Formal model comparison indicated that the model of multiword phrase construction provided a better fit than probabilitybased models at most sites in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices. Activity in those regions was consistent with a neural implementation of a bottom-up or left-corner parser of the incoming language stream. Our results provide initial intracranial evidence for the neurophysiological reality of the merge operation postulated by linguists and suggest that the brain compresses syntactically wellformed sequences of words into a hierarchy of nested phrases.ost linguistic theories hold that the proper theoretical description of sentences is not a linear sequence of words, in the way we encounter it during reading or listening, but rather a hierarchical structure of nested phrases (1-4). Whether and how the brain encodes such nested structures during language comprehension, however, remains largely unknown. Brain-imaging studies of syntax have homed in on a narrow set of left-hemisphere areas (5-16), particularly the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), whose activation correlates with predictors of syntactic complexity (6,7,10,13,14). In particular, core syntax areas in left IFG and posterior STS (pSTS) show an increasing activation with the number of words that can be integrated into a well-formed phrase (10,14). Similarly, magneto-encephalography signals show increasing power in beta and theta bands during sentence-structure build-up (17) and a systematic phase locking to phrase structure in the low-frequency domain (18).These studies leave open the central question of whether and how neural populations in these brain areas create hierarchical phrase structures within each sentence. To address this question, intracranial recordings with more precise joint spatial and temporal resolution may be necess...

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“…Previous studies reported that neural responses of only a few areas within the occipito-temporal cortex increased linearly with visibility or presentation duration of written input (Ben-Shachar et al, 2007;Price and Friston, 1997;Vagharchakian et al, 2012). Here, we found a linear activation pattern in all of the areas identified in the network described above.…”

Section: Stimulus-driven Activation Of Orthographic Phonological Andsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…Yet, given the existence of functional and anatomical connections between the visual and auditory systems (Booth et al, 2002;Thiebaut De Schotten et al, 2014;Vagharchakian et al, 2012;Yeatman et al, 2011), it is likely that processing written words also induces activation in the spoken language system, although to a lesser extent. To further examine how the spoken language system is influenced by written words' visibility and task demand, we restricted our analyses to the cortical areas that process acoustic, phonological and semantic contents of spoken sentences, using the subject-specific approach proposed by NietoCastañón and Fedorenko (2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Automaticity of phonological and semantic processing during visual word recognition

Pattamadilok

Chanoine²,

Pallier

et al. 2017

NeuroImage

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A B S T R A C TReading involves activation of phonological and semantic knowledge. Yet, the automaticity of the activation of these representations remains subject to debate. The present study addressed this issue by examining how different brain areas involved in language processing responded to a manipulation of bottom-up (level of visibility) and top-down information (task demands) applied to written words. The analyses showed that the same brain areas were activated in response to written words whether the task was symbol detection, rime detection, or semantic judgment. This network included posterior, temporal and prefrontal regions, which clearly suggests the involvement of orthographic, semantic and phonological/articulatory processing in all tasks. However, we also found interactions between task and stimulus visibility, which reflected the fact that the strength of the neural responses to written words in several high-level language areas varied across tasks. Together, our findings suggest that the involvement of phonological and semantic processing in reading is supported by two complementary mechanisms. First, an automatic mechanism that results from a taskindependent spread of activation throughout a network in which orthography is linked to phonology and semantics. Second, a mechanism that further fine-tunes the sensitivity of high-level language areas to the sensory input in a task-dependent manner.

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A Temporal Bottleneck in the Language Comprehension Network

Cited by 101 publications

References 70 publications

Abnormal Resting State fMRI Activity Predicts Processing Speed Deficits in First-Episode Psychosis

Abnormal Resting State fMRI Activity Predicts Processing Speed Deficits in First-Episode Psychosis

Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing

Automaticity of phonological and semantic processing during visual word recognition

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