Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension.

ABSTRACT: Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model's linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.

SUBMITTER: Frank SL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5957381 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature