To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad‐coverage tools from natural‐language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context‐free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not sufficiently expressive for human languages. Combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs) are sufficiently expressive directly compositional models of grammar with flexible constituency that affords incremental interpretation. In this work, we evaluate whether a more expressive CCG provides a better model than a CFG for human neural signals collected with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants listen to an audiobook story. We further test between variants of CCG that differ in how they handle optional adjuncts. These evaluations are carried out against a baseline that includes estimates of next‐word predictability from a transformer neural network language model. Such a comparison reveals unique contributions of CCG structure‐building predominantly in the left posterior temporal lobe: CCG‐derived measures offer a superior fit to neural signals compared to those derived from a CFG. These effects are spatially distinct from bilateral superior temporal effects that are unique to predictability. Neural effects for structure‐building are thus separable from predictability during naturalistic listening, and those effects are best characterized by a grammar whose expressive power is motivated on independent linguistic grounds.

Hierarchical sentence structure plays a role in word-by-word human sentence comprehension, but it remains unclear how best to characterize this structure and unknown how exactly it would be recognized in a step-by-step process model. With a view towards sharpening this picture, we model the time course of hemodynamic activity within the brain during an extended episode of naturalistic language comprehension using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). CCG has well-defined incremental parsing algorithms, surface compositional semantics, and can explain long-range dependencies as well as complicated cases of coordination. We find that CCG-derived predictors improve a regression model of fMRI time course in six language-relevant brain regions, over and above predictors derived from context-free phrase structure. Adding a special Revealing operator to CCG parsing, one designed to handle right-adjunction, improves the fit in three of these regions. This evidence for CCG from neuroimaging bolsters the more general case for mildly context-sensitive grammars in the cognitive science of language. Mary reads papers NP (S \NP )/NP NP mary ′ λx.λy.reads ′ (y, x) papers ′ > S \NP λy.reads ′ (y, papers ′ ) < S reads ′ (mary ′ , papers ′ ) (a) Right-branching derivation. Mary reads papers NP (S \NP )/NP NP mary ′ λx.λy.reads ′ (y, x) papers ′ >T S /(S \NP ) λp.p mary ′ >B S /NP λx.reads ′ (mary ′ , x) > S reads ′ (mary ′ , papers ′ ) (b) Left-branching derivation.

One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom a speaker is referring to. While previous work has documented the neural correlates of general number comprehension and quantity comparison, we investigate semantic number from a cross-linguistic perspective with the goal of identifying cortical regions involved in distinguishing plural from singular nouns. We use three fMRI datasets in which Chinese, French, and English native speakers listen to an audiobook of a children's story in their native language. We select these three languages because they differ in their number semantics. While Chinese lacks nominal pluralization, French and English nouns are overtly marked for number. We find a number of known semantic processing regions in common, including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the pars orbitalis, in which cortical activation is greater for plural than singular nouns and posit a cross-linguistic role for number in semantic comprehension.

No abstract

Words can occur arbitrarily far away from where they contribute their meaning in a sentence. Two examples are WH-questions (WHQs), which begin with a WH-word like what and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs), in which a noun is modified by a sentence-like grammatical unit. While these long-distance dependencies have been extensively studied, never before have their brain bases been examined from a multi-lingual, naturalistic perspective. This study fills this gap by analyzing WHQs and ORCs in fMRI data collected while 35 Chinese participants (15 females) and 49 English participants (30 females) listen to translation-equivalent stories. These languages exhibit radical typological differences in word order in these constructions. It remains unknown whether the brain basis for comprehension in these languages is similar or different. Separate general linear model analyses were performed and voxel-level intersections were calculated between the results to identify common regions of selectively increased activation during the comprehension of these linguistic constructions. Further Bayesian region of interest analyses probed whether common increases were truly similar. We found remarkable cross-linguistic commonality for both constructions. WHQs were associated with increased activation in the left middle and superior temporal lobe, left temporoparietal junction, left inferior frontal gyrus, and bilateral medial frontal lobe. ORCs were associated with increased activation in the left middle temporal lobe, left inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus, bilateral posterior cingulate, bilateral precuneus, and left medial frontal lobe. These results support the hypothesis that, regardless of form, the brain bases of higher-level language processing are uniform across languages.

No abstract

We analyze palatalization from /z/ to [3] at word boundaries in UK English. Previous research has investigated palatalization in the context of /s#j/, showing that lexical frequency influences its occurrence across word boundaries. Palatalization by voiced coronal fricatives is less well-understood, particularly in naturalistic speech, which we study using the Audio BNC (http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/AudioBNC). We hypothesize that palatalization across word boundaries is subject to the Production Planning Hypothesis. That is, palatalization should be modulated by the extent to which phonological information for the second word is available when the first word is planned. We analyze spectral center of gravity (CoG) in fricatives from 7,134 word pairs across four phonological contexts, comparing test tokens subject to palatalization, /z#j/ (e.g., “is you”), to control pairs containing non-alternating /z#V/ (e.g., “is it”), or /Ê&#x92;/ (e.g., “rouge it,” “precision”). Although significant correlates of CoG vary by speaker gender, the acoustics of /z#j/ are predicted by factors related to production planning, including fricative duration, speech rate, presence and length of inter-word pause or sentence boundary, word-pair frequency, and following vowel acoustics. A supervised classification task using acoustics and lexical frequency metrics also distinguishes /z#j/ from /z#V/ and /3#V/ with above-chance accuracy, illustrating automatic detection of palatalization.

Are the brain bases of language comprehension the same across all human languages, or do these bases vary in a way that corresponds to differences in linguistic typology? English and Mandarin Chinese attest such a typological difference in the domain of relative clauses. Using fMRI with English and Chinese participants, who listened to the same translation-equivalent story, we analyzed neuroimages time-aligned to object-extracted relative clauses in both languages. In a GLM analysis of these naturalistic data, comprehension was selectively associated with increased hemodynamic activity in left posterior temporal lobe, angular gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex in both languages. This result suggests the processing of object-extracted relative clauses is subserved by a common collection of brain regions, regardless of typology. However, there were also regions that were activated uniquely in our Chinese participants albeit not to a significantly greater degree. These were in the temporal lobe. These Chinese-specific results could reflect structural ambiguity-resolution work that must be done in Chinese but not English ORCs.