ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2023
Semantic Representations during Language Comprehension Are Affected by Context.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- A population code for semantics in human hippocampus.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production.Science advances · 2026Article
- Controlled Retrieval Relies on Directed Interactions between Semantic Control Regions and Visual Cortex: MEG Evidence from Oscillatory Dynamics.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Bilingual language processing relies on shared semantic representations that are modulated by each language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Rapid cortical mapping with cross-participant encoding models.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Psilocybin alters visual contextual computations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Hybrid spatial organization and magnitude-independent coding of linguistic information during sentence production.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Multi-voxel pattern analysis for developmental cognitive neuroscientists.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Review
- Narrative 'twist' shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of the Processing of Speech Features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Brain-model neural similarity reveals abstractive summarization performance.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Voxelwise Encoding Model framework: A tutorial introduction to fitting encoding models to fMRI data.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of the Processing of Speech Features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Cortical activations in cognitive task performance at multiple frequency bands.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The cortical representation of language timescales is shared between reading and listening.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Computational Language Modeling and the Promise of In Silico Experimentation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Semantic versus perceptual priming: dissecting their impact on intuitive judgments of semantic coherence.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The meaning of words in natural language depends crucially on context. However, most neuroimaging studies of word meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. Because the brain may process natural language differently from how it processes simplified stimuli, there is a pressing need to determine whether prior results on word meaning generalize to natural language. fMRI was used to record human brain activity while four subjects (two female) read words in four conditions that vary in context: narratives, isolated sentences, blocks of semantically similar words, and isolated words. We then compared the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of evoked brain responses, and we used a voxelwise encoding modeling approach to compare the representation of semantic information across the four conditions. We find four consistent effects of varying context. First, stimuli with more context evoke brain responses with higher SNR across bilateral visual, temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices compared with stimuli with little context. Second, increasing context increases the representation of semantic information across bilateral temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices at the group level. In individual subjects, only natural language stimuli consistently evoke widespread representation of semantic information. Third, context affects voxel semantic tuning. Finally, models estimated using stimuli with little context do not generalize well to natural language. These results show that context has large effects on the quality of neuroimaging data and on the representation of meaning in the brain. Thus, neuroimaging studies that use stimuli with little context may not generalize well to the natural regime.
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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.