What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building

Nina Kazanina; Alessandro Tavano

doi:10.1038/s41583-022-00659-5

What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building

Nina Kazanina
, Alessandro Tavano

Bristol Neuroscience

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

49 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations - chunking and multiscale information integration - and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	113-128
Number of pages	16
Journal	Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Volume	24
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00659-5
Publication status	Published - 2 Dec 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors are very grateful to E. Lau and M. Yoshida for their vast input and feedback. They also thank J. Mitchell for help with corpus data, J. Bowers for his comments and S. Brendecke for help with illustrations. N.K. acknowledges the support of the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation (grant 075-15-2022-1037). A.T. acknowledges the support of the Max Planck Society.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Springer Nature Limited.

Keywords

Humans
Language
Memory
Semantics

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abstract = "Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations - chunking and multiscale information integration - and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.",

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N2 - Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations - chunking and multiscale information integration - and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.

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KW - Humans

KW - Language

KW - Memory

KW - Semantics

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JO - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

JF - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

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What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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