ArticleeLife2022
Neural tracking of phrases in spoken language comprehension is automatic and task-dependent.
Article in eLife, 2022. 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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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Functional identification of language-responsive sensors in individual participants in MEG investigations.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Linguistic structure and language familiarity sharpen phoneme encoding in the brain.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Cortical speech envelope tracking reflects lesion-symptom profiles in post-stroke aphasia.Brain communications · 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
- Test-Retest Reliability of TRF-Derived Measures of Cortical Tracking of the Speech Envelope.eNeuro · 2025Article
- What's Surprising About Surprisal.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Challenges and Methods in Annotating Natural Speech for Neurolinguistic Research.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Language-specific neural dynamics extend syntax into the time domain.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Structural and sequential regularities modulate phrase-rate neural tracking.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Phase-dependent word perception emerges from region-specific sensitivity to the statistics of language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Alpha and Beta Oscillations Differentially Support Word Production in a Rule-Switching Task.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Auditory-motor synchronization and perception suggest partially distinct time scales in speech and music.Communications psychology · 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
- A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension.eLife · 2023Article
- Neurophysiological Evidence for Semantic Processing of Irrelevant Speech and Own-Name Detection in a Virtual Café.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Delta-Band Neural Responses to Individual Words Are Modulated by Sentence Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Linguistic phrases are tracked in sentences even though there is no one-to-one acoustic phrase marker in the physical signal. This phenomenon suggests an automatic tracking of abstract linguistic structure that is endogenously generated by the brain. However, all studies investigating linguistic tracking compare conditions where either relevant information at linguistic timescales is available, or where this information is absent altogether (e.g., sentences versus word lists during passive listening). It is therefore unclear whether tracking at phrasal timescales is related to the content of language, or rather, results as a consequence of attending to the timescales that happen to match behaviourally relevant information. To investigate this question, we presented participants with sentences and word lists while recording their brain activity with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants performed passive, syllable, word, and word-combination tasks corresponding to attending to four different rates: one they would naturally attend to, syllable-rates, word-rates, and phrasal-rates, respectively. We replicated overall findings of stronger phrasal-rate tracking measured with mutual information for sentences compared to word lists across the classical language network. However, in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) we found a task effect suggesting stronger phrasal-rate tracking during the word-combination task independent of the presence of linguistic structure, as well as stronger delta-band connectivity during this task. These results suggest that extracting linguistic information at phrasal rates occurs automatically with or without the presence of an additional task, but also that IFG might be important for temporal integration across various perceptual domains.
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