Decoding the Neural Dynamics of Headed Syntactic Structure Building

The brain builds hierarchical phrases during language comprehension; however, the details and dynamics of the phrase-building process remain underspecified. This study directly probes whether the neural code of verb phrases involves reactivating the syntactic property of a key subcomponent (the &quo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience Vol. 45; no. 17
Main Authors: Zhao 赵隽元, Junyuan, Gao 高睿敏, Ruimin, Brennan, Jonathan R
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 23.04.2025
Subjects:
Adult
Brain - physiology
Comprehension - physiology
Electroencephalography
Female
Humans
Language
Male
Reading
Speech Perception - physiology
Young Adult
language comprehension
electroencephalography
neural decoding
syntax
ISSN:1529-2401, 1529-2401
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:The brain builds hierarchical phrases during language comprehension; however, the details and dynamics of the phrase-building process remain underspecified. This study directly probes whether the neural code of verb phrases involves reactivating the syntactic property of a key subcomponent (the "head" verb). To this end, we train a part-of-speech sliding-window verb/adverb decoder on EEG signals recorded while 30 participants read sentences in a controlled experiment. The decoder reaches above-chance performance that is spatiotemporally consistent and generalizes to unseen data across sentence positions. Applying the decoder to held-out data yields predicted activation levels for the verbal "head" of a verb phrase at a distant nonhead word (adverb); the critical adverb appeared either at the end of a verb phrase or at a sequentially and lexically matched position with no verb phrase boundary. There is stronger verb activation beginning at ∼600 milliseconds at the critical adverb when it appears at a verb phrase boundary; this effect is not modulated by the strength of conceptual association nor does it reflect word predictability. Time-locked analyses additionally reveal a negativity waveform component and increased beta-delta inter-trial phase coherence, both previously linked to linguistic composition, in a similar time window. With a novel application of neural decoding, our findings delineate the dynamics by which the brain encodes phrasal representations by, in part, reactivating the representation of key subcomponents. We thus establish a link between cognitive accounts of phrasal representations and electrophysiological dynamics.
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ISSN:1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2126-24.2025