ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Neural basis of basic composition: what we have learned from the red-boat studies and their extensions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of lexical and morphosyntactic planning during language production revealed by magnetoencephalography.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Decoding words during sentence production with ECoG reveals syntactic role encoding and structure-dependent temporal dynamics.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Decoding the Neural Dynamics of Headed Syntactic Structure Building.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural encoding of semantic structures during sentence production.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- From Empirical Problem-Solving to Theoretical Problem-Finding Perspectives on the Cognitive Sciences.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Structural and sequential regularities modulate phrase-rate neural tracking.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Diverging neural dynamics for syntactic structure building in naturalistic speaking and listening.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Conversational production and comprehension: fMRI-evidence reminiscent of but deviant from the classical Broca-Wernicke model.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Neural manifolds carry reactivation of phonetic representations during semantic processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Localizing Syntactic Composition with Left-Corner Recurrent Neural Network Grammars.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Connectivity of Fronto-Temporal Regions in Syntactic Structure Building During Speaking and Listening.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Intraoperative cortical localization of music and language reveals signatures of structural complexity in posterior temporal cortex.iScience · 2023Article
- Dimensionality and Ramping: Signatures of Sentence Integration in the Dynamics of Brains and Deep Language Models.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Exploring the neurobiology of Merge at a basic level: insights from a novel artificial grammar paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The neurocognitive basis of Chinese idiomatic constructions and processing differences between native speakers and L2 learners of Mandarin.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Lexico-semantics obscures lexical syntax.Frontiers in language sciences · 2023Article
- The Wernicke conundrum revisited: evidence from connectome-based lesion-symptom mapping.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2022Article
- Combining computational controls with natural text reveals aspects of meaning composition.Nature computational science · 2022Article
- The role of left angular gyrus in the representation of linguistic composition relations.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Minimal Phrase Composition Revealed by Intracranial Recordings.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
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Abstract
Language is our mind's most powerful generative system for the expression of meaning and thought. What are the neural mechanisms of our ability to compose complex meanings from simpler representations? This question is impossible to answer unless we decompose the notion of 'meaning composition' in some theoretically guided way and then begin to assess the extent to which brain activity tracks the posited subroutines. Here, I summarize results from a body of MEG research that has begun to address this question from the ground up, first focusing on simple combinations of two words. The work sets off with a hypothesis space offered by theoretical linguistics, positing syntactic and logico-semantic composition as the main combinatory routines, but then reveals that the most consistent and prominent reflection of composition, localized in the left anterior temporal cortex at 200-250 ms, cannot be described with this toolkit. Instead, this activity tracks a much more conceptually driven process, robustly sensitive to the density of the conceptual feature space of the composing items. I will describe our functional understanding of this activity and how it may operate within a broader 'combinatory network.' This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.
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