ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Neural dynamics of semantic composition.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production.Science advances · 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
- Hybrid spatial organization and magnitude-independent coding of linguistic information during sentence production.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Low-frequency cortical activity reflects context-dependent parsing of word sequences.iScience · 2025Article
- A Rapid Cortical Learning Process Supporting Students' Knowledge Construction During Real Classroom Teaching.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Decoding the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Neural Response Similarity in Auditory Processing: A Multivariate Analysis Based on OPM-MEG.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Evaluating cochlear implant outcomes in DFNA9 subjects: a comprehensive study on cerebral white matter lesions and vestibular abnormalities.European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology : official journal of the European Federation of Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Societies (EUFOS) : affiliated with the German Society for Oto-Rhino-Laryngology - Head and Neck Surgery · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural encoding of semantic structures during sentence production.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Article
- Dissociating the pre-activation of word meaning and form during sentence comprehension: Evidence from EEG representational similarity analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Perceived similarity as a window into representations of integrated sentence meaning.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Connectivity of Fronto-Temporal Regions in Syntactic Structure Building During Speaking and Listening.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Semantic composition in experimental and naturalistic paradigms.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Hearing what is being said: the distributed neural substrate for early speech interpretation.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2024Article
- Recurrent connectivity supports higher-level visual and semantic object representations in the brain.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Predictive coding across the left fronto-temporal hierarchy during language comprehension.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Towards a unifying theory of linguistic meaning.Communicative & integrative biology · 2023Article
- Context free and context-dependent conceptual representation in the brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Combining computational controls with natural text reveals aspects of meaning composition.Nature computational science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human speech comprehension is remarkable for its immediacy and rapidity. The listener interprets an incrementally delivered auditory input, millisecond by millisecond as it is heard, in terms of complex multilevel representations of relevant linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge. Central to this process are the neural computations involved in semantic combination, whereby the meanings of words are combined into more complex representations, as in the combination of a verb and its following direct object (DO) noun (e.g., "eat the apple"). These combinatorial processes form the backbone for incremental interpretation, enabling listeners to integrate the meaning of each word as it is heard into their dynamic interpretation of the current utterance. Focusing on the verb-DO noun relationship in simple spoken sentences, we applied multivariate pattern analysis and computational semantic modeling to source-localized electro/magnetoencephalographic data to map out the specific representational constraints that are constructed as each word is heard, and to determine how these constraints guide the interpretation of subsequent words in the utterance. Comparing context-independent semantic models of the DO noun with contextually constrained noun models reflecting the semantic properties of the preceding verb, we found that only the contextually constrained model showed a significant fit to the brain data. Pattern-based measures of directed connectivity across the left hemisphere language network revealed a continuous information flow among temporal, inferior frontal, and inferior parietal regions, underpinning the verb's modification of the DO noun's activated semantics. These results provide a plausible neural substrate for seamless real-time incremental interpretation on the observed millisecond time scales.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.