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Like all domains of cognition, language processing is affected by top–down knowledge. Classic evidence for this is missing blatant errors in the signal. In sentence comprehension, one instance is failing to notice word order errors, such as transposed words in the middle of a sentence: “you that read wrong” (Mirault et al., 2018). Our brains seem to fix such errors, since they are incompatible with our grammatical knowledge, but how do our brains do this? Following behavioral work on inner transpositions, we flashed four-word sentences for 300 ms using rapid parallel visual presentation (Snell and Grainger, 2017). We compared magnetoencephalography responses to fully grammatical and reversed sentences (24 human participants: 21 females, 4 males). The left lateral language cortex robustly distinguished grammatical and reversed sentences starting at 213 ms. Thus, the influence of grammatical knowledge begun rapidly after visual word form recognition (Tarkiainen et al., 1999). At the earliest stage of this neural “sentence superiority effect,” inner transpositions patterned between grammatical and reversed sentences, showing evidence that the brain initially “noticed” the error. However, 100 ms later, inner transpositions became indistinguishable from grammatical sentences, suggesting at this point, the brain had “fixed” the error. These results show that after a single glance at a sentence, syntax impacts our neural activity almost as quickly as higher-level object recognition is assumed to take place (Cichy et al., 2014). The earliest stage involves detailed comparisons between the bottom–up input and grammatical knowledge, while shortly afterward, top–down knowledge can override an error in the stimulus. 

Human brains grasp the gists of visual scenes from a single glance, but to what extent is this possible for language? While we typically think of language in terms of sequential speech, our everyday experience involves numerous rapidly flashing written notifications, which we understand instantly. What do our brains detect in the first few hundred milliseconds after seeing such a stimulus? We flashed short sentences during magnetoencephalography measurement, revealing sentence-sensitive neural activity in left temporal cortex within 130 milliseconds. These signals emerged for subject-verb-object sentences regardless of grammatical or semantic well-formedness, suggesting that at-a-glance language comprehension begins by detecting basic phrase structure, independent of meaning or other grammatical details. Our findings unveil one aspect of how our brains process information rapidly in today’s visually saturated world. 

Abstract Naturalistic paradigms using movies or audiobooks have become increasingly popular in cognitive neuroscience, but connecting them to findings from controlled experiments remains rare. Here, we aim to bridge this gap in the context of semantic composition in language processing, which is typically examined using a “minimal” two-word paradigm. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated whether the neural signatures of semantic composition observed in an auditory two-word paradigm can extend to naturalistic story listening, and vice versa. Our results demonstrate consistent differentiation between phrases and single nouns in the left anterior and middle temporal lobe, regardless of the context. Notably, this distinction emerged later during naturalistic listening. Yet this latency difference disappeared when accounting for various factors in the naturalistic data, such as prosody, word rate, word frequency, surprisal, and emotional content. These findings suggest the presence of a unified compositional process underlying both isolated and connected speech comprehension. 

The picture naming task is common both as a clinical task and as a method to study the neural bases of speech production in the healthy brain. However, this task is not reflective of most naturally occurring productions, which tend to happen within a context, typically in dialogue in response to someone else’s production. How the brain basis of the classic “confrontation picture naming” task compares to the planning of utterances in dialogue is not known. Here we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure neural activity associated with language production using the classic picture naming task as well as a minimal variant of the task, intended as more interactive or dialogue-like. We assessed how neural activity is affected by the interactive context in children, teenagers, and adults. The general pattern was that in adults, the interactive task elicited a robust sustained increase of activity in frontal and temporal cortices bilaterally, as compared to simple picture naming. This increase was present only in the left hemisphere in teenagers and was absent in children, who, in fact, showed the reverse effect. Thus our findings suggest a robustly bilateral neural basis for the coordination of interaction and a very slow developmental timeline for this network. 

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension).We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).