Journal
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
Volume 40, Issue 15, Pages 4457-4469Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/hbm.24714
Keywords
language comprehension; magnetoencephalography; semantic composition; semantic representations
Funding
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Foundation for the National Institutes of Health [1r01hd075328-0]
- Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity [31081.1]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
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As a person reads, the brain performs complex operations to create higher order semantic representations from individual words. While these steps are effortless for competent readers, we are only beginning to understand how the brain performs these actions. Here, we explore lexical semantics using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of people reading adjective-noun phrases presented one word at a time. We track the neural representation of single word representations over time, through different brain regions. Our results reveal two novel findings: (a) a neural representation of the adjective is present during noun presentation, but this representation is different from that observed during adjective presentation and (b) the neural representation of adjective semantics observed during adjective reading is reactivated after phrase reading, with remarkable consistency. We also note that while the semantic representation of the adjective during the reading of the adjective is very distributed, the later representations are concentrated largely to temporal and frontal areas previously associated with composition. Taken together, these results paint a picture of information flow in the brain as phrases are read and understood.
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