Cortical Tracking of Hierarchical Linguistic Structures in Connected Speech

By Nai Ding, Lucia Melloni, Hang Zhang, Xing Tian, David Poeppel. Nature Neuroscience, 2015

941 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The most critical attribute of human language is its unbounded combinatorial nature: smaller elements can be combined into larger structures on the basis of a grammatical system, resulting in a hierarchy of linguistic units, such as words, phrases and sentences. Mentally parsing and representing such structures, however, poses challenges for speech comprehension. In speech, hierarchical linguistic structures do not have boundaries that are clearly defined by acoustic cues and must therefore be internally and incrementally constructed during comprehension. We found that, during listening to connected speech, cortical activity of different timescales concurrently tracked the time course of abstract linguistic structures at different hierarchical levels, such as words, phrases and sentences. Notably, the neural tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures was dissociated from the encoding of acoustic cues and from the predictability of incoming words. Our results indicate that a hierarchy of neural processing timescales underlies grammar-based internal construction of hierarchical linguistic structure.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5b4c8dfd1efdd5617de03e5e946c35fb6f190ac

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Citations in the corpus

The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing (2020, background): “…1996; Steedman, 2000; van Schijndel et al., 2013), and neural responses to linguistic input (Brennan et al., 2016; Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2017; Ding et al., 2015; Frank et al., 2015; Henderson et al., 2016; Huth et al., 2016; Lopopolo et al., 2017; Lyu et al., 2019; T. M. Mitchell et al.,…”
Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing (2017, background): “An entrainment of magneto-encephalographic and intracranial responses at the frequency with which phrase structures recurred in short sentences was recently reported (18).”
Psychology, Science, and Knowledge Construction: Broadening Perspectives from the Replication Crisis (2018, background): “2015) or with replications with new participants (Ding et al. 2016).”
Distinct contributions of low- and high-frequency neural oscillations to speech comprehension (2017, background): “High-frequency activity also represented, concurrently with delta oscillations, the segmentation of longer abstract linguistic structures (phrases and sentences) in continuous speech (Ding et al., 2016).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “Frontal and temporal language cortices can represent and manipulate information delivered at different rates, and over intervals of different duration (Fuster 1995; Pallier et al. 2011; Ding et al. 2016).”
Cortical encoding of probabilistic temporal predictions during speech perception (2026, unknown): “…prediction has been primarily framed through the preferred timescales at which linguistic units unfold: phonemes around 10-15 Hz, syllables around 4–5 Hz, content words around 1–2 Hz, or slower supra-lexical structures such as phrases, sentences, and intonational units (11, 12, 15, 16, 26).”
Speech and music recruit frequency-specific distributed and overlapping cortical networks (2024, methodology): “Patients provided informed consent prior to the experimental session, and the experimental protocol was approved by the Institutional Review board of the French Institute of Health (IRB00003888).”
Neural signatures of syntactic variation in speech planning (2021, unknown): “The origin of oscillatory activity can be exogenous or endogenous for the comprehension and perception of language [81–83].”