Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies

Online neurostimulation of Broca’s area does not interfere with syntactic predictions: A combined TMS-EEG approach to basic linguistic combination

“…At the two-word level, the presence of a late positivity has been reported for agreement ( Barber and Carreiras, 2005 ; Hasting and Kotz, 2008 ) and categorical ( Jakuszeit et al, 2013 ) violations. The present data converge with these earlier studies, demonstrating that the late syntactic processes observed with longer sentential stimuli can be observed already at the minimal two-word level (see also Maran et al, 2022 for a recent review). Overall, our findings suggest that the recursivity that characterizes syntactic composition ( Everaert et al, 2015 ; Friederici et al, 2017 ) can be observed at the neurophysiological level, with functionally equivalent processes at the basis of building both minimal phrases and more complex structures.…”

“…Crucially, the grammatical and ungrammatical items differed only in whether the second word violated a syntactic rule or not, as in principle potential syntactic predictions triggered by the first word would be present in both conditions. Therefore, the increased activation of BA44 in this experiment might reflect the bottom-up detection of an error, indexing that integration into a constituent is disrupted as no grammatical rule to be applied is found (see also Maran et al, 2022 for a similar discussion). Overall, these studies support the notion that Broca’s area, and specifically BA44, is involved in the bottom-up integration of words into structures, as categorical predictions could be generated also in the control conditions.…”

“…On a final note, we wish to point out that debate exists on the degree to which linguistic predictions might stem from the hierarchical structure of language (e.g., Brennan and Hale, 2019) or the linear order of words (e.g., Frank and Bod, 2011). Our study alone does not allow to distinguish between these two types of linguistic prediction, but evidence in the literature supports the notion of abstract syntactic processing when analysing basic two-word constructions (see Maran et al, 2022 for a review). For example, effects of grammaticality have been observed in studies employing pseudo-words (Lukatela et al, 1982(Lukatela et al, , 1983, and early ERP components (e.g., sMMN) reflect the well-formedness of two-word constructions rather than the frequency of co-occurrence of their words (Pulvermüller and Assadollahi, 2007;Herrmann et al, 2009).…”

Cleaning up the Brickyard: How Theory and Methodology Shape Experiments in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language

“…Data from EEG and MEG language studies are traditionally analyzed focusing on event-related potentials (ERPs; Luck, 2005) or neural oscillations (Buzsáki & Draguhn, 2004). On the one hand, several ERP components (e.g., ELAN, LAN, N400, P600) have been linked to specific stages of linguistic processing (e.g., phrasal building, morphosyntactic analysis, semantic composition, integration; see (Friederici, 2011;Hernández et al, 2022;Maran, Friederici, et al, 2022;Zaccarella & Friederici, 2015b). On the other, distinct neural oscillations seem to subserve the multiscale property of language, from the processing of phonetic and syllabic units to phrases, and ultimately to more complex aspects of comprehension (e.g., Benítez-Burraco & Murphy, 2019;Giraud & Poeppel, 2012;A.…”

“…Given the large-scale nature of the language network, there is great potential for adaptive plasticity in order to compensate for a focal perturbation of a key region when using TMS (Hartwigsen, 2018). In line with this, evidence shows that unifocal perturbation with (repetitive) TMS is often not sufficient to perturb various language-related processes (see, e.g., Kroczek et al, 2019;Maran, Friederici, et al, 2022), whereas the use of combined perturbation of two brain regions leads to an observable effect (e.g., Hartwigsen et al, 2016;Schroën et al, 2020).…”