ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020
Linguistic Structure and Meaning Organize Neural Oscillations into a Content-Specific Hierarchy.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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46 citing papers in PubMed, 125 citations in OpenAlex.
- Speech Neurophysiology in Realistic Contexts: Big Hype or Big Leap?The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Review
- Linguistic structure and language familiarity sharpen phoneme encoding in the brain.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Altered Hierarchical Visual Rhythm Tracking in Early Deafness.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Temporal-oscillatory entrainment: a multi-timescale framework for rhythmic coordination from neural to social frequencies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Left Perisylvian Rhythms Encode Prosody and Syntax during Delayed Sentence Repetition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 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
- Test-Retest Reliability of TRF-Derived Measures of Cortical Tracking of the Speech Envelope.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Decoding the Neural Dynamics of Headed Syntactic Structure Building.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Not primed to agree? Short or no effect of rhythmic priming on typical adults processing number agreement.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
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- What's Surprising About Surprisal.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Neural tracking of natural speech: an effective marker for post-stroke aphasia.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Language-specific neural dynamics extend syntax into the time domain.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- The structure and statistics of language jointly shape cross-frequency neural dynamics during spoken language comprehension.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Early language experience modulates the tradeoff between acoustic-temporal and lexico-semantic cortical tracking of speech.iScience · 2024Article
- Structural and sequential regularities modulate phrase-rate neural tracking.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Auditory-motor synchronization and perception suggest partially distinct time scales in speech and music.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Neurodynamical Computing at the Information Boundaries of Intelligent Systems.Cognitive computation · 2024Article
- Lexical Surprisal Shapes the Time Course of Syntactic Structure Building.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Distinct roles of delta- and theta-band neural tracking for sharpening and predictive coding of multi-level speech features during spoken language processing.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neural oscillations track linguistic information during speech comprehension (Ding et al., 2016; Keitel et al., 2018), and are known to be modulated by acoustic landmarks and speech intelligibility (Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015). However, studies investigating linguistic tracking have either relied on non-naturalistic isochronous stimuli or failed to fully control for prosody. Therefore, it is still unclear whether low-frequency activity tracks linguistic structure during natural speech, where linguistic structure does not follow such a palpable temporal pattern. Here, we measured electroencephalography (EEG) and manipulated the presence of semantic and syntactic information apart from the timescale of their occurrence, while carefully controlling for the acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information in the signal. EEG was recorded while 29 adult native speakers (22 women, 7 men) listened to naturally spoken Dutch sentences, jabberwocky controls with morphemes and sentential prosody, word lists with lexical content but no phrase structure, and backward acoustically matched controls. Mutual information (MI) analysis revealed sensitivity to linguistic content: MI was highest for sentences at the phrasal (0.8-1.1 Hz) and lexical (1.9-2.8 Hz) timescales, suggesting that the delta-band is modulated by lexically driven combinatorial processing beyond prosody, and that linguistic content (i.e., structure and meaning) organizes neural oscillations beyond the timescale and rhythmicity of the stimulus. This pattern is consistent with neurophysiologically inspired models of language comprehension (Martin, 2016, 2020; Martin and Doumas, 2017) where oscillations encode endogenously generated linguistic content over and above exogenous or stimulus-driven timing and rhythm information.
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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.