Delta-band neural tracking primarily reflects rule-based chunking instead of semantic relatedness between words.

ABSTRACT: It is debated whether cortical responses matching the time scales of phrases and sentences mediate the mental construction of the syntactic chunks or are simply caused by the semantic properties of words. Here, we investigate to what extent delta-band neural responses to speech can be explained by semantic relatedness between words. To dissociate the contribution of semantic relatedness from sentential structures, participants listened to sentence sequences and paired-word sequences in which semantically related words repeated at 1 Hz. Semantic relatedness in the 2 types of sequences was quantified using a word2vec model that captured the semantic relation between words without considering sentential structure. The word2vec model predicted comparable 1-Hz responses with paired-word sequenc

SUBMITTER: Lu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10110438 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature