Building phrases in language production: An MEG study of simple composition

Pylkkänen, Liina; Bemis, Douglas K.; Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.07.001

Cited by 88 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…This pattern suggests that LATL activity is specifically engaged by composition itself, rather than a high-level sentential process or a low-level difference between the number of lexical items in the stimulus. These results have been replicated in both listening and reading (Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2013) as well as in production (Pylkkänen, Bemis, & Blanco Elorrieta, 2014), suggesting they are not modality-specific. Further, similar results have been obtained by Baron, Thompson-Schill, Weber, and Osherson (2010), Baron and Osherson (2011), who showed that the LATL is engaged in conceptual combination across and within words.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 54%

The LATL as locus of composition: MEG evidence from English and Arabic

et al. 2015

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 54%

The LATL as locus of composition: MEG evidence from English and Arabic

et al. 2015

Self Cite

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“…This operationalization is a coarse measure that collapses over finer-grained distinctions that may affect the formation of semantic and syntactic dependencies (e.g. and reviews, Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2011;Pylkkänen, Bemis, & Elorrieta, 2014;Pylkkänen, 2016Pylkkänen, , 2019. However, to the extent that this operationalization can account for patterns of neural (in this case, BOLD) responses and thus yield insights about the workings of the language system, it holds theoretical and empirical value.…”

Section: Computing Mutual Information Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Composition is the core driver of the language-selective network

Mollica¹,

Siegelman²,

Diachek³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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The fronto-temporal language network responds robustly and selectively to sentences. But the features of linguistic input that drive this response and the computations these language areas support remain debated. Two key features of sentences are typically confounded in natural linguistic input: words in sentences a) are semantically and syntactically combinable into phrase-and clause-level meanings, and b) occur in an order licensed by the language's grammar. Inspired by recent psycholinguistic work establishing that language processing is robust to word order violations, we hypothesized that the core linguistic computation is composition, and, thus, can take place even when the word order violates the grammatical constraints of the language. This hypothesis predicts that a linguistic string should elicit a sentence-level response in the language network as long as the words in that string can enter into dependency relationships as in typical sentences. We tested this prediction across two fMRI experiments (total N=47) by introducing a varying number of local word swaps into naturalistic sentences, leading to progressively less syntactically well-formed strings. Critically, local dependency relationships were preserved because combinable words remained close to each other. As predicted, word order degradation did not decrease the magnitude of the BOLD response in the language network, except when combinable words were so far apart that composition among nearby words was highly unlikely. This finding demonstrates that composition is robust to word order violations, and that the language regions respond as strongly as they do to naturalistic linguistic input as long as composition can take place.

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“…Yet, within this line of research, very few neurophysiological studies have investigated encoding processes for multi-word utterances. Pylkkänen, Bemis, and Blanco Elorrieta (2014) used MEG to compare the production of isolated nouns and adjective + noun phrases. They observed differences in neural activity between the two utterance types starting at about 180 ms after picture onset, which they associated with combinatory processes (grammatical encoding).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential processing during noun phrase production

et al. 2016

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This study examined whether the brain operations involved during the processing of successive words in multi word noun phrase production take place sequentially or simultaneously. German speakers named pictures while ignoring a written distractor superimposed on the picture (picture-word interference paradigm) using the definite determiner and corresponding German noun. The gender congruency and the phonological congruency (i.e., overlap in first phonemes) between target and distractor were manipulated. Naming responses and EEG were recorded. The behavioural performance replicated both the phonology and the gender congruency effects (i.e., shorter naming latencies for gender congruent than incongruent and for phonologically congruent than incongruent trials). The phonological and gender manipulations also influenced the EEG data. Crucially, the two effects occurred in different time windows and over different sets of electrodes. The phonological effect was observed substantially earlier than the gender congruency effect. This finding suggests that the processing of determiners and nouns during determiner noun phrase production occurs at least partly sequentially.

show abstract

Building phrases in language production: An MEG study of simple composition

Cited by 88 publications

References 70 publications

The LATL as locus of composition: MEG evidence from English and Arabic

The LATL as locus of composition: MEG evidence from English and Arabic

Composition is the core driver of the language-selective network

Sequential processing during noun phrase production

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