Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension.

Stefan L Frank,Jinbiao Yang,Jonathan R Brennan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0197304

Stefan L Frank, Jinbiao Yang + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197304

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Abstract

Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model’s linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.

Highlights

IntroductionMelloni, Zhang, Tian, and Poeppel [6] recently presented evidence that cortical entrainment during speech perception reflects the neural tracking of hierarchical structure of simple sentences, which would support the view that hierarchical processing is inevitable
There is considerable debate on the precise role of hierarchical syntactic structure during sentence comprehension, with some arguing that full hierarchical analysis is part and parcel of the comprehension process (e.g., [1, 2], among many others) and others claiming that more shallow [3] or even non-hierarchical [4, 5] processing is common
Melloni, Zhang, Tian, and Poeppel [6] recently presented evidence that cortical entrainment during speech perception reflects the neural tracking of hierarchical structure of simple sentences, which would support the view that hierarchical processing is inevitable

Summary

Introduction

Melloni, Zhang, Tian, and Poeppel [6] recently presented evidence that cortical entrainment during speech perception reflects the neural tracking of hierarchical structure of simple sentences, which would support the view that hierarchical processing is inevitable. They had participants listen to sequences of linguistic material consisting of English monosyllabic words or Chinese syllables, presented at a fixed rate of one syllable every 250 ms (or at a slightly slower rate for English).

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