Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT05283265 (Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Language Comprehension), which is not on this map. Cited by 123 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Language Comprehension
Who cites it
123 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Neural networks for sentence comprehension and production: An ALE-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.Human brain mapping · 2019Pooled it
- Review
- Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Processing at Phrase Boundaries During Self-Paced Reading.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Syntactic Processing in the Aging Brain: Neural Reorganization, Cognitive Scaffolding, and Implications for Language Resilience.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Active use of latent tree-structured sentence representation in humans and large language models.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The Temporal Dynamics of the Labeling Algorithm During Natural Language Comprehension: Neural Evidence for Phrase Grammatical Type Generation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- Building hierarchically nested structure by rapid neural sequences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- SIGNAL: Dataset for Semantic and Inferred Grammar Neurological Analysis of Language.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Left Perisylvian Rhythms Encode Prosody and Syntax during Delayed Sentence Repetition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Hybrid spatial organization and magnitude-independent coding of linguistic information during sentence production.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Recurrent neural networks as neuro-computational models of human speech recognition.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Decoding the Neural Dynamics of Headed Syntactic Structure Building.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
63 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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 probability-based 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 well-formed sequences of words into a hierarchy of nested phrases.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.