Lexical Surprisal Shapes the Time Course of Syntactic Structure Building.

ABSTRACT: When we understand language, we recognize words and combine them into sentences. In this article, we explore the hypothesis that listeners use probabilistic information about words to build syntactic structure. Recent work has shown that lexical probability and syntactic structure both modulate the delta-band (<4 Hz) neural signal. Here, we investigated whether the neural encoding of syntactic structure changes as a function of the distributional properties of a word. To this end, we analyzed MEG data of 24 native speakers of Dutch who listened to three fairytales with a total duration of 49 min. Using temporal response functions and a cumulative model-comparison approach, we evaluated the contributions of syntactic and distributional features to the variance in the delta-band neural signa

SUBMITTER: Slaats S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11556436 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature