Delta-band neural activity primarily tracks sentences instead of semantic properties of words

Delta-band neural activity primarily tracks sentences instead of semantic properties of words

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Human language is generally combinatorial: Words are combined into sentences to flexibly convey meaning.How the brain represents sentences, however, remains debated.Recently, it has been shown that delta-band cortical activity correlates with the sentential structure of speech.It remains debated, however, whether delta-band cortical tracking of sentences truly Face Paints reflects mental representations of sentences or is caused by neural encoding of semantic properties of individual words.The current study investigates whether delta-band neural tracking of speech can be explained by semantic properties of individual words.

Cortical activity is recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) when participants listen to sentences repeating at 1 Hz and word lists.The semantic properties of individual words, simulated using a word2vec model, predict a stronger 1 Hz response to word lists than to sentences.When listeners perform a word-monitoring task that does not require sentential processing, the 1 Hz response to word lists, however, is much weaker than the 1 Hz response to sentences, contradicting the prediction of the lexical semantics model.When listeners are explicitly asked to parse word lists into multi-word chunks, however, cortical activity can reliably track the multi-word chunks.Taken together, these results suggest that delta-band neural responses to speech Butter Knives cannot be fully explained by the semantic properties of single words and are potentially related to the neural representation of multi-word chunks.