ArticleScience advances2024
Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input.
Article in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 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
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Simultaneous Cortical Responses to Multiple Written Words.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Constituent-constrained word prediction during language comprehension.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Simultaneous cortical responses to multiple written words.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Article
- The cost of language: functionally over-dominant language circuits in the human brain may limit cognitive abilities and non-verbal executive functions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human brains grasp the gists of visual scenes from a single glance, but to what extent is this possible for language? While we typically think of language in terms of sequential speech, our everyday experience involves numerous rapidly flashing written notifications, which we understand instantly. What do our brains detect in the first few hundred milliseconds after seeing such a stimulus? We flashed short sentences during magnetoencephalography measurement, revealing sentence-sensitive neural activity in left temporal cortex within 130 milliseconds. These signals emerged for subject-verb-object sentences regardless of grammatical or semantic well-formedness, suggesting that at-a-glance language comprehension begins by detecting basic phrase structure, independent of meaning or other grammatical details. Our findings unveil one aspect of how our brains process information rapidly in today's visually saturated world.
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