Dr. Lars Meyer | The Working Memory of Sentence Comprehension: Spatio-Temporal Brain Dynamics

Language comprehension relies heavily on working memory: Multiple words in speech must be chunked into phrases, which are stored for the establishment of dependencies with other phrases, and which are retrieved for dependency establishment. Prominent examples include the processing of the dependencies between subjects and verbs, or the dependencies between nouns and pronouns.

I will present here a line of electroencephalography studies using time–frequency decomposition, source-localization techniques, and functional-connectivity analysis—backed by converging evidence from functional-magnetic-resonance imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging, performed both on healthy participants and lesion patients. I will show how the chunking of multiple words into phrases is achieved through the phase of delta-band oscillations, how storage of phrases is achieved through the local functional inhibition of the relevant cortex through increases in alpha-band power, and how phrase retrieval involves the synchronization of theta-band oscillations in a large-scale fronto–posterior network.

I will argue that the highly specialized functional brain network of sentence comprehension relies on neural-oscillatory principles of information extraction, processing, and transfer that are common across cognitive domains. The dissection of the abstract notion of sentence comprehension into its concrete working-memory sub-components bears great potential for the neuroscientific investigation of syntax.