Presentation
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Naturalistic spoken language comprehension is supported by alpha and beta oscillations
Poster D67 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Ioanna Zioga1,2, Hugo Weissbart1, Ashley G. Lewis1,2, Saskia Haegens1,3,4, Andrea E. Martin1,2; 1Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 2Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 3Columbia University, New York, USA, 4New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, USA
Brain oscillations are prevalent in all species and are involved in numerous perceptual operations. α oscillations are thought to facilitate processing through the inhibition of task-irrelevant networks, while β oscillations are linked to the putative reactivation of content representations. Can the proposed functional role of α and β oscillations be generalized from low-level operations to higher-level cognitive processes? Here we address this question focusing on naturalistic spoken language comprehension. Twenty-two (18 female) Dutch native speakers listened to stories in Dutch and French while MEG was recorded. We used dependency parsing to identify three dependency states at each word: the number of (1) newly opened dependencies, (2) dependencies that remained open, and (3) resolved dependencies. We then constructed forward models to predict α and β power from the dependency features. Results showed that dependency features predict α and β power in language-related regions beyond low-level linguistic features. Left temporal, fundamental language regions are involved in language comprehension in α, while frontal and parietal, higher-order language regions, and motor regions are involved in β. Critically, α- and β-band dynamics seem to subserve language comprehension tapping into syntactic structure building and semantic composition by providing low-level mechanistic operations for inhibition and reactivation processes. Because of the temporal similarity of the α-β responses, their potential functional dissociation remains to be elucidated. Overall, this study sheds light on the role of α and β oscillations during naturalistic spoken language comprehension, providing evidence for the generalizability of these dynamics from perceptual to complex linguistic processes.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,