Abstract
Planning to speak is a challenge for the brain, and the challenge varies between and within languages. Yet, little is known about how neural processes react to these variable challenges beyond the planning of individual words. Here, we examine how fundamental differences in syntax shape the time course of sentence planning. Most languages treat alike (i.e., align with each other) the 2 uses of a word like “gardener” in “the gardener crouched” and in “the gardener planted trees.” A minority keeps these formally distinct by adding special marking in 1 case, and some languages display both aligned and nonaligned expressions. Exploiting such a contrast in Hindi, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking to suggest that this difference is associated with distinct patterns of neural processing and gaze behavior during early planning stages, preceding phonological word form preparation. Planning sentences with aligned expressions induces larger synchronization in the theta frequency band, suggesting higher working memory engagement, and more visual attention to agents than planning nonaligned sentences, suggesting delayed commitment to the relational details of the event. Furthermore, plain, unmarked expressions are associated with larger desynchronization in the alpha band than expressions with special markers, suggesting more engagement in information processing to keep overlapping structures distinct during planning. Our findings contrast with the observation that the form of aligned expressions is simpler, and they suggest that the global preference for alignment is driven not by its neurophysiological effect on sentence planning but by other sources, possibly by aspects of production flexibility and fluency or by sentence comprehension. This challenges current theories on how production and comprehension may affect the evolution and distribution of syntactic variants in the world’s languages.
Highlights
Language is not a disparate and haphazard collection of idiosyncratic templates for how to formulate sentences
EEG oscillatory power changes were analyzed with mixed-effects regression trees [53], which partition the data set by sentence type and regions of interest (ROIs; averaging across electrode positions within these regions) with respect to the time course of power changes, analyzed as polynomial growth curves
We found broadly distributed event-related desynchronization (ERD) starting after around 400 ms and peaking around 700 ms (Fig 3B), which was larger in sentences with unmarked noun phrases (“The gardener. . .”) than in sentences with marked noun phrases (“The gardener+x. . .”)
Summary
Language is not a disparate and haphazard collection of idiosyncratic templates for how to formulate sentences. Sentences like “The gardener planted a tree,” “The gardener crouched,” “The gardener worked hard,” or “A tree was planted by the gardener” align with each other in an abstract way by employing templates that begin with the same structure, here, with a noun phrase (the subject: “the gardener” and “a tree”) followed by a verb (“plants,” “crouches,” “works,” and “was”), while they differ in the remainder Such alignments differ between languages in striking ways. Other languages do not align the 2 sentence types and instead add a special marker in sentences with more than 1 noun phrase, keeping them formally distinct from sentences with only 1 noun phrase These languages contrast a plain, unmarked noun phrase in intransitives (“the gardener crouched”) with a marked agent noun phrase in transitives (“the gardener+x planted trees,” with an additional marker represented here by “+x”; cf Fig 1). This phenomenon, known as ergativity [1,2], is found in about one-third of the world’s languages [3]
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