Building by Syntax: The Neural Basis of Minimal Linguistic Structures

Zaccarella, Emiliano; Meyer, Lars; Makuuchi, Michiru; Friederici, Angela D.

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhv234

Cited by 103 publications

(135 citation statements)

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“…This region, Brodmann area 44, has been identified as a locus of syntactic processing in numerous fMRI studies of healthy adults (Goucha & Friederici, 2015; Heim, Opitz, & Friederici, 2003; Zaccarella, Meyer, Makuuchi, & Friederici, 2015) and in studies of patients with impairments of grammatical comprehension and expression (Ash et al, 2009; Charles et al, 2014; Grossman et al, 2013; Gunawardena et al, 2010). The present study associates deficits in syntactic processing with this neuroanatomic region during active and unconstrained production of syntax.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal decline in speech production in Parkinson's disease spectrum disorders

et al. 2017

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We examined narrative speech production longitudinally in non-demented (n=15) and mildly demented (n=8) patients with Parkinson's disease spectrum disorder (PDSD), and we related increasing impairment to structural brain changes in specific language and motor regions. Patients provided semi-structured speech samples, describing a standardized picture at two time points (mean±SD interval=38±24 months). The recorded speech samples were analyzed for fluency, grammar, and informativeness. PDSD patients with dementia exhibited significant decline in their speech, unrelated to changes in overall cognitive or motor functioning. Regression analysis in a subset of patients with MRI scans (n=11) revealed that impaired language performance at Time 2 was associated with reduced gray matter (GM) volume at Time 1 in regions of interest important for language functioning but not with reduced GM volume in motor brain areas. These results dissociate language and motor systems and highlight the importance of non-motor brain regions for declining language in PDSD.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal decline in speech production in Parkinson's disease spectrum disorders

et al. 2017

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“…This fits with the results from Schell et al (2017), who found aIFG activation for adjective-noun phrases (blue boat) versus single words (boat). Consequently, aIFG involvement might reflect increased semantic load carried by real words, which also goes beyond sentential level (Zaccarella et al, 2015), to track the amount of semantic information to be integrated.…”

Section: General Phrasal Composition Engages a Large Semantic Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential contributions of left-hemispheric language regions to basic semantic composition

Graessner

Zaccarella

Hartwigsen

2019

Preprint

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Semantic composition, i.e. the ability to combine single words to form complex meanings, is a core feature of human language. Despite growing interest in the basis of semantic composition, the neural correlates and the interaction of regions within this network remain a matter of debate.In the present fMRI study, we designed a well controlled two-word paradigm in which phrases only differed along the semantic dimension while keeping syntactic information alike. 33 healthy participants listened to meaningful phrases ("fresh apple"), anomalous phrases ("awake apple") and pseudoword phrases ("awake gufel") while performing both an implicit and an explicit semantic task. We identified neural signatures for distinct processes during basic semantic composition: The general phrasal composition process, which is independent of the plausibility of the resulting phrase, engages a wide-spread left hemispheric network comprising both executive semantic control regions as well as general conceptual representation regions. Within this network, the functional connectivity between the left anterior inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral pre-supplementary motor area and the posterior angular gyrus specifically increases during meaningful phrasal composition. The anterior angular gyrus, on the other hand, guides more specific compositional processing evaluating phrasal plausibility. Overall, our results were stronger in the explicit task, pointing towards partly task-dependent involvement of the regions.Here we provide a separation between distinct nodes of the semantic network, whose functional contributions depend on the type of compositional process under analysis. For the first time, we show that the angular gyrus may be decomposable into two sub-regions during semantic composition.

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“…This is a crucial step in the creation of the hierarchies (trees of entities) that seem necessary for the syntactic processing of language, but also for hierarchical thinking more generally (e.g., deduction, discourse, planning, story-telling, etc.). Recent fMRI experiments [40] have indicated that, indeed, the completion of phrases and sentences (the completion of auditory stimuli such as "hill top" and "ship sunk") activates parts of Broca's area -in particular, the pars opercularis BA 44 for phrases, and the pars triangularis BA 45 for sentences. In contrast, unstructured word sequences such as "hill ship" do not seem to activate Broca's area.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain computation by assemblies of neurons

Papadimitriou

Vempala²,

Mitropolsky

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Assemblies are large populations of neurons believed to imprint memories, concepts, words and other cognitive information. We identify a repertoire of operations on assemblies. These operations correspond to properties of assemblies observed in experiments, and can be shown, analytically and through simulations, to be realizable by generic, randomly connected populations of neurons with Hebbian plasticity and inhibition. Operations on assemblies include: projection (duplicating an assembly by creating a new assembly in a downstream brain area); reciprocal projection (a variant of projection also entailing synaptic connectivity from the newly created assembly to the original one); association (increasing the overlap of two assemblies in the same brain area to reflect cooccurrence or similarity of the corresponding concepts); merge (creating a new assembly with ample synaptic connectivity to and from two existing ones); and pattern-completion (firing of an assembly, with some probability, in response to the firing of some but not all of its neurons). Our analytical results establishing the plausibility of these operations are proved in a simplified mathematical model of cortex: a finite set of brain areas each containing n excitatory neurons, with random connectivity that is both recurrent (within an area) and afferent (between areas). Within one area and at any time, only k of the n neurons fire -an assumption that models inhibition and serves to define both assemblies and areaswhile synaptic weights are modified by Hebbian plasticity, as well as homeostasis. Importantly, all neural apparatus needed for the functionality of the assembly operations is created on the fly through the randomness of the synaptic network, the selection of the k neurons with the highest synaptic input, and Hebbian plasticity, without any special neural circuits assumed to be in place. Assemblies and their operations constitute a computational model of the brain which we call the Assembly Calculus, occupying a level of detail intermediate between the level of spiking neurons and synapses, and that of the whole brain. As with high-level programming languages, a computation in the Assembly Calculus (that is, a coherent sequence of assembly operations accomplishing a task) can ultimately be reduced -"compiled down" -to computation by neurons and synapses; however, it would be far more cumbersome and opaque to represent the same computation that way. The resulting computational system can be shown, under assumptions, to be in principle capable of carrying out arbitrary computations. We hypothesize that something like it may underlie higher human cognitive functions such as reasoning, planning, and language. In particular, we propose a plausible brain architecture based on assemblies for implementing the syntactic processing of language in cortex, which is consistent with recent experimental results.

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Building by Syntax: The Neural Basis of Minimal Linguistic Structures

Cited by 103 publications

References 97 publications

Longitudinal decline in speech production in Parkinson's disease spectrum disorders

Longitudinal decline in speech production in Parkinson's disease spectrum disorders

Differential contributions of left-hemispheric language regions to basic semantic composition

Brain computation by assemblies of neurons

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