Combinatorial semantics strengthens angular-anterior temporal coupling

Molinaro, Nicola; Paz‐Alonso, Pedro M.; Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni; Carreiras, Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.01.004

Cited by 29 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Clearly, the finding of different patterns of activation for Correct Agreement and Agreement Violation sentences in this region does not argue in favor of the local syntactic structure-building hypothesis: in this case one would have expected the three contrasts to give rise to equivalent responses in this area, since the three types of sentence are characterized by the same local syntactic structure (regardless of morphosyntactic consistency). On the contrary, the increased aMTG activation that we report for the Correct vs. Incorrect 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 22 contrast is in line with data on agreement processing by Quiñones et al (2014), who have reported aMTG involvement in the processing of both standard agreement and unagreement sentences, and more in general with claims advancing the role of this region in the elaboration of higher-level information (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2013;Lau et al 2008;Molinaro et al 2015;Pallier et al 2011). Under this assumption, the finding of a significant response in this area for person, but not for number anomalies, gives us an important insight into the type of mechanism supported by this area.…”

Section: Assignment Of Interpretively Relevant Roles: the Role Of Thesupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Critically, a recent study (Molinaro et al 2015) has demonstrated the presence of a significant coupling between anterior temporal regions and the IFG during semantic processing.…”

Section: Evaluation Of Subject-verb Morphosyntactic Fit: Interplay Bementioning

confidence: 98%

“…A better framework for the discussion of these data is therefore provided by studies and models that assume pMTG involvement in the extraction of information from the input to build syntactic structure (Hagoort, 2005;Hickock and Poeppel, 2007;Lau et al 2008;Molinaro et al 2015;Pallier et al 2011). In this respect, the quantitative dissociation found between person and number would result from their different underlying structural representations (Bianchi, 2006;S.…”

Section: Structure Building: the Role Of The Pmtgmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another interpretation attributes a critical role to the aMTG in the integration of different types of information to derive the propositional meaning of a sentence (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2013), a claim that connects with a larger literature on the role of this region in semantic memory and conceptual combination (cf. Baron et al 2010;Molinaro et al 2015;Patterson et al, 2007).…”

Section: Assignment Of Interpretively Relevant Roles: the Role Of Thementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The information extracted from the input in the pMTG could be made available to further regions in the network, through ventral and dorsal connections to anterior portions of the temporal cortex and left frontal areas (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2013;Dronkers et al 2004;Hagoort, 2013;Molinaro et al 2015;Papoutsi et al 2011;Saur et al 2008;Wilson et al 2012), where subsequent analysis steps could be carried out, as described below.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Mancini

Quiñones

Molinaro

et al. 2017

Cortex

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Sentence comprehension is successfully accomplished by means of a form-to-meaning mapping procedure that relies on the extraction of morphosyntactic information from the input and its mapping to higher-level semantic-discourse representations. In this study, we sought to determine whether neuroanatomically distinct brain regions are involved in the processing of different types of information contained in the propositional meaning of a sentence, namely person and number. While person information indexes the role that an individual has in discourse (i.e. the speaker, the addressee or the entity being talked about by speaker and addressee), number indicates its cardinality (i.e. a single entity vs. a multitude of entities). An event-related fMRI experiment was run using agreement-correct and person-and number-violated sentences in Spanish, to disentangle the processing mechanisms and neural substrates associated with the building of discourse and cardinality representations. The contrast between person and number violations showed qualitative and quantitative differences. A greater response for person compared to number was found in the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG). However, critically, a posterior-to-anterior functional gradient emerged within this region. While the posterior portion of the LMTG was sensitive to both person and number violations, the anterior portion of this region showed selective response for person violations. These results confirm that the comprehension of the propositional meaning of a sentence results from a composite, feature-sensitive mechanism of form-to-meaning mapping in which the nodes of the language network are differentially involved

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Section: Assignment Of Interpretively Relevant Roles: the Role Of Thesupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Critically, a recent study (Molinaro et al 2015) has demonstrated the presence of a significant coupling between anterior temporal regions and the IFG during semantic processing.…”

Section: Evaluation Of Subject-verb Morphosyntactic Fit: Interplay Bementioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Structure Building: the Role Of The Pmtgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Assignment Of Interpretively Relevant Roles: the Role Of Thementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Mancini

Quiñones

Molinaro

et al. 2017

Cortex

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How Does the Left Anterior Temporal Lobe Contribute to Conceptual Combination? Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Westerlund

Pylkkänen

2017

Language, Cognition, and Mind

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Within the cognitive neuroscience of language, the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) is one of the most consistent loci for semantic effects; yet its precise role in semantic processing remains unclear. Here we focus on a literature showing that the LATL is modulated by semantic composition even in the simplest of cases, suggesting that it has a central role in the construction of complex meaning. We show that while the LATL's combinatory contribution generalizes across several linguistic factors, such as composition type and word order, it is also robustly modulated by conceptual factors such as the specificity of the composing words. These findings suggest that the LATL's role in composition is at the conceptual as opposed to the syntactic or logico-semantic level, making formal semantic theories of composition less obviously useful for guiding future research on the LATL. For an alternative theoretical foundation, this chapter seeks to connect LATL research to psychological models of conceptual combination, which potentially offer a more fruitful space of hypotheses to constrain our understanding of the computations housed in the LATL. We conclude that, though currently available data on the LATL do not rule out relation-based models, they are most consistent with schema-based models of conceptual combination, with the LATL potentially representing the site of concept schema activation and modification. This chapter is a lightly revised version of Chap. 4 in Masha Westerlund's 2015 Ph.D. thesis entitled "Unpacking the neural basis of conceptual combination with MEG" (

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

2021

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Semantic composition, 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. We designed a well-controlled two-word fMRI paradigm in which phrases only differed along the semantic dimension while keeping syntactic information alike. Healthy participants listened to meaningful (“fresh apple”), anomalous (“awake apple”) and pseudoword phrases (“awake gufel”) while performing an implicit and an explicit semantic task. We identified neural signatures for distinct processes during basic semantic composition. When lexical information is kept constant across conditions and the evaluation of phrasal plausibility is examined (meaningful vs. anomalous phrases), a small set of mostly left-hemispheric semantic regions, including the anterior part of the left angular gyrus, is found active. Conversely, when the load of lexical information—independently of phrasal plausibility—is varied (meaningful or anomalous vs. pseudoword phrases), conceptual combination involves a wide-spread left-hemispheric network comprising executive semantic control regions and general conceptual representation regions. Within this network, the functional coupling between the left anterior inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral pre-supplementary motor area and the posterior angular gyrus specifically increases for meaningful phrases relative to pseudoword phrases. Stronger effects in the explicit task further suggest task-dependent neural recruitment. Overall, we provide a separation between distinct nodes of the semantic network, whose functional contributions depend on the type of compositional process under analysis.

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Combinatorial semantics strengthens angular-anterior temporal coupling

Cited by 29 publications

References 54 publications

Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

How Does the Left Anterior Temporal Lobe Contribute to Conceptual Combination? Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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

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