Observational studyScientific reports2021
Left posterior temporal cortex is sensitive to syntax within conceptually matched Arabic expressions.
Observational study in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Shared Neural Computations for Syntactic and Morphological Structures: Evidence From Mandarin Chinese.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Decoding the Neural Dynamics of Headed Syntactic Structure Building.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Language-specific neural dynamics extend syntax into the time domain.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Constraining current neuroanatomical models of reading: the view from Arabic.Brain structure & function · 2024Review
- The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing during At-a-Glance Reading.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input.Science advances · 2024Article
- Lesion-symptom Mapping of Acceptability Judgments in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia Reveals the Neurobiological Underpinnings of Receptive Syntax.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Localizing Syntactic Composition with Left-Corner Recurrent Neural Network Grammars.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- How long is long? Word length effects in reading correspond to minimal graphemic units: An MEG study in Bangla.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Grammatical Parallelism in Aphasia: A Lesion-Symptom Mapping Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Evoked responses to note onsets and phrase boundaries in Mozart's K448.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Minimal Phrase Composition Revealed by Intracranial Recordings.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Inflection across Categories: Tracking Abstract Morphological Processing in Language Production with MEG.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Online neurostimulation of Broca's area does not interfere with syntactic predictions: A combined TMS-EEG approach to basic linguistic combination.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Semantic and syntactic specialization during auditory sentence processing in 7-8-year-old children.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During language comprehension, the brain processes not only word meanings, but also the grammatical structure-the "syntax"-that strings words into phrases and sentences. Yet the neural basis of syntax remains contentious, partly due to the elusiveness of experimental designs that vary structure independently of meaning-related variables. Here, we exploit Arabic's grammatical properties, which enable such a design. We collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) data while participants read the same noun-adjective expressions with zero, one, or two contiguously-written definite articles (e.g., 'chair purple'; 'the-chair purple'; 'the-chair the-purple'), representing equivalent concepts, but with different levels of syntactic complexity (respectively, indefinite phrases: 'a purple chair'; sentences: 'The chair is purple.'; definite phrases: 'the purple chair'). We expected regions processing syntax to respond differently to simple versus complex structures. Single-word controls ('chair'/'purple') addressed definiteness-based accounts. In noun-adjective expressions, syntactic complexity only modulated activity in the left posterior temporal lobe (LPTL), ~ 300 ms after each word's onset: indefinite phrases induced more MEG-measured positive activity. The effects disappeared in single-word tokens, ruling out non-syntactic interpretations. In contrast, left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) activation was driven by meaning. Overall, the results support models implicating the LPTL in structure building and the LATL in early stages of conceptual combination.
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