The Neuromagnetism of Natural Language Combinatory Semantics
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1
New York University , United States
The essence of human language is its unbounded combinatory potential: Generative systems of syntax and semantics allow for the composition of an infinite range of expressions from a limited set of elementary building blocks. Although cognitive neuroscience has made much progress in characterizing the neural bases of lexical access, i.e., how the brain retrieves the meanings of the elementary building blocks, our understanding of the neural mechanisms of the combinatory functions remains elusive at best. A principle challenge for studying natural language combinatorics is compositionality: In most cases, the composition of complex syntactic structure is perfectly correlated with the composition of complex meaning. In an initial set of magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies, we aimed to identify a neural correlate of semantic composition by focussing on a narrow set of phenomena exhibiting a dissociation between syntactic and semantic composition. These studies consistently yielded an effect of semantic composition in a mid-line prefrontal MEG component, the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), localizing in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). I will discuss a series of studies aimed at further charactering the functional role of this activity as well as results implicating the left anterior temporal lobe for syntactic composition.
Conference:
Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism , Dubrovnik, Croatia, 28 Mar - 1 Apr, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Pylkkanen
L
(2010). The Neuromagnetism of Natural Language Combinatory Semantics.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism .
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.06.00203
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Received:
30 Mar 2010;
Published Online:
30 Mar 2010.
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Correspondence:
Liina Pylkkanen, New York University, New York, United States, liina.pylkkanen@nyu.edu