Ultra-rapid access to words in the brain

MacGregor, Lucy; Pulvermüller, Friedemann; Casteren, Maarten van; Shtyrov, Yury

doi:10.1038/ncomms1715

Cited by 170 publications

(142 citation statements)

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“…However, most recent investigations suggested that the earliest brain reflections of lexical access can be seen much earlier, already at 50-80 ms (23). This earliness, in turn, may indicate that the speed of language processing in the brain is faster than believed previously and that even the 150-to 200-ms activations may therefore be late and possibly even secondary.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 89%

Automatic ultrarapid activation and inhibition of cortical motor systems in spoken word comprehension

Shtyrov

Butorina

Nikolaeva

et al. 2014

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

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119

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To address the hotly debated question of motor system involvement in language comprehension, we recorded neuromagnetic responses elicited in the human brain by unattended actionrelated spoken verbs and nouns and scrutinized their timecourse and neuroanatomical substrates. We found that already very early on, from ∼80 ms after disambiguation point when the words could be identified from the available acoustic information, both verbs and nouns produced characteristic somatotopic activations in the motor strip, with words related to different body parts activating the corresponding body representations. Strikingly, along with this category-specific activation, we observed suppression of motorcortex activation by competitor words with incompatible semantics, documenting operation of the neurophysiological principles of lateral/surround inhibition in neural word processing. The extremely early onset of these activations and deactivations, their emergence in the absence of attention, and their similar presence for words of different lexical classes strongly suggest automatic involvement of motor-specific circuits in the perception of actionrelated language.embodied cognition | lexical semantics | magnetoencephalography | MEG | mismatch negativity T he old debate on localization of cognitive functions in the brain was recently reinvigorated with the advent of a concept of mirror neurons and a closely related framework of grounded cognition (1-8). The mirror neuron theory stemmed from a seminal discovery of neurons that activate equally when a specific action is performed by the tested individual or when observing the same action performed by others, giving a strong neurophysiological proof for the concept of comprehension and learning through simulation (for a review, see ref. 1). This is enabled by the presence of perception-action circuits in the brain that can provide motor areas with multimodal sensory information (2). An array of findings in mirror neuron and related research strongly suggest that the motor system is not merely a "slave" or an "output" of any central processing, but that it also takes an active role in perception and comprehension of external events. In cognitive science, which had suggested the emergence of concepts from individual experiences long before these neurophysiological discoveries (3-5), a similar strand of research led to a more general framework of "grounding" (or "embodiment") of cognitive functions and representations in bodily sensations and actions, which was supported through a range of behavioral and neurophysiological experiments (6-8).Nowhere these approaches resonated more than in the neuroscience of language. Following breakthrough neurological studies of the 19th century (9, 10), the human language function was for many decades confined to a small set of cortical areas in the left hemisphere. More recent research, however, challenged these views in favor of linguistic representations distributed over a range of brain areas, which span beyond the core language cortices of B...

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 89%

Automatic ultrarapid activation and inhibition of cortical motor systems in spoken word comprehension

Shtyrov

Butorina

Nikolaeva

et al. 2014

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

Self Cite

119

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“…They wanted to find out about the point in time when the acoustic information allows word recognition. Results showed that this crucial point occurs 50-80 ms after presentation (McGregor et al, 2012). In a word reading task that compared different semantic word classes with similar physical appearance by using textual characters (Chinese), electrical brain activation differed significantly for each semantic word class.…”

Section: Realistic Time Frames For Turn-end-detectionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Müller and Kutas (1996), for example, showed that the initial 100-120 ms of words already provide enough information in order to decide whether a sound is the beginning of a noun or a name. In another study McGregor et al (2012) investigated the crucial point of word recognition in spoken words versus pseudowords. They wanted to find out about the point in time when the acoustic information allows word recognition.…”

Section: Realistic Time Frames For Turn-end-detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the readiness potential of button-press and verbal response within spoken language processing

Jansen

Wesselmeier

Ruiter

et al. 2014

Journal of Neuroscience Methods

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h i g h l i g h t s• Detection of readiness potential onset represents a preconscious measure for end-of-turn anticipation in a language dialogue.• Even if it is a language task it can be applied equally well to both verbal and finger movement responses.• In contrast to behavioural reaction time tasks the EEG-measurement produces more reliable data for the anticipation performance in end-of-turndetection.a r t i c l e i n f o New method: The purpose of this study was to examine if readiness potentials (RP) can be used to study the anticipation of turn-ends by using it in a motoric finger movement and articulatory movement task. The goal was to determine the preconscious onset of turn-end anticipation in early, preconscious turn-end anticipation processes by the simultaneous registration of EEG measures (RP) and behavioural measures (anticipation timing accuracy, ATA). For our behavioural measures, we used both button-press and verbal response ("yes"). In the experiment, 30 subjects were asked to listen to auditorily presented utterances and press a button or utter a brief verbal response when they expected the end of the turn. During the task, a 32-channel-EEG signal was recorded. Results: The results showed that the RPs during verbal-and button-press-responses developed similarly and had an almost identical time course: the RP signals started to develop 1170 vs. 1190 ms before the behavioural responses. Comparison with existing methods: Until now, turn-end anticipation is usually studied using behavioural methods, for instance by measuring the anticipation timing accuracy, which is a measurement that reflects conscious behavioural processes and is insensitive to preconscious anticipation processes. Conclusion: The similar time course of the recorded RP signals for both verbal-and button-press responses provide evidence for the validity of using RPs as an online marker for response preparation in turn-taking and spoken dialogue research.

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“…MacGregor et al [20] and Visser et al [21] state that lexicalsemantic categorization is necessary to interpret words and cannot be performed for invented words. Given the Google hypothesis 'Musa red pyramid for sale spec', our system "does not know" words like 'Musa', 'sale' or 'spec', as they are not contained in the training data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic reanalysis in language models for speech recognition

Twiefel

Hinaut

Wermter³

2017

2017 Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob)

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Abstract-State-of-the-art speech recognition systems steadily increase their performance using different variants of deep neural networks and postprocess the results by employing N-gram statistical models trained on a large amount of data coming from the general-purpose domain. While achieving an excellent performance regarding Word Error Rate (17.343% on our HumanRobot Interaction data set), state-of-the-art systems generate hypotheses that are grammatically incorrect in 57.316% of the cases. Moreover, if employed in a restricted domain (e.g. HumanRobot Interaction), around 50% of the hypotheses contain out-ofdomain words. The latter are confused with similarly pronounced in-domain words and cannot be interpreted by a domain-specific inference system.The state-of-the-art speech recognition systems lack a mechanism that addresses the syntactic correctness of hypotheses. We propose a system that can detect and repair grammatically incorrect or infrequent sentence forms. It is inspired by a computational neuroscience model that we developed previously. The current system is still a proof-of-concept version of a future neurobiologically more plausible neural network model. Hence, the resulting system postprocesses sentence hypotheses of state-ofthe-art speech recognition systems, producing in-domain words in 100% of the cases, syntactically and grammatically correct hypotheses in 90.319% of the cases. Moreover, it reduces the Word Error Rate to 11.038%.

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Ultra-rapid access to words in the brain

Cited by 170 publications

References 50 publications

Automatic ultrarapid activation and inhibition of cortical motor systems in spoken word comprehension

Automatic ultrarapid activation and inhibition of cortical motor systems in spoken word comprehension

Using the readiness potential of button-press and verbal response within spoken language processing

Syntactic reanalysis in language models for speech recognition

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