Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how we鈥檙e able to understand spoken language so rapidly, and it involves a huge and complex set of computations in the brain.
Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how we鈥檙e able to understand spoken language so rapidly, and it involves a huge and complex set of computations in the brain.
探花直播way our brain enables us to understand what someone is saying, as they鈥檙e saying it, is remarkable. By looking at the real-time flow of information in the brain we鈥檝e shown how word meanings are being rapidly interpreted and put into context.
Lorraine Tyler
In a published today in the journal PNAS, researchers at the 探花直播 of Cambridge developed novel computational models of the meanings of words, and tested these directly against real-time brain activity in volunteers.
鈥淥ur ability to put words into context, depending on the other words around them, is an immediate process and it鈥檚 thanks to the best computer we鈥檝e ever known: the brain in our head. It鈥檚 something we haven鈥檛 yet managed to fully replicate in computers because it is still so poorly understood,鈥 said Lorraine Tyler, Director of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at the 探花直播 of Cambridge, which ran the study.
Central to understanding speech are the processes involved in what is known as 鈥榮emantic composition鈥 鈥 in which the brain combines the meaning of words in a sentence as they are heard, so that they make sense in the context of what has already been said. This new study has revealed the detailed real-time processes going on inside the brain that make this possible.
By saying the phrase: 鈥渢he elderly man ate the apple鈥 and watching how the volunteers鈥 brains responded, the researchers could track the dynamic patterns of information flow between critical language regions in the brain.
As the word 鈥榚at鈥 is heard, it primes the brain to put constraints on how it interprets the next word in the sentence: 鈥榚at鈥 is likely to be something to do with food. 探花直播study shows how these constraints directly affect how the meaning of the next word in the sentence is understood, revealing the neural mechanisms underpinning this essential property of spoken language 鈥 our ability to combine sequences of words into meaningful expressions, millisecond by millisecond as the speech is heard.
鈥 探花直播way our brain enables us to understand what someone is saying, as they鈥檙e saying it, is remarkable,鈥 said Professor Tyler. 鈥淏y looking at the real-time flow of information in the brain we鈥檝e shown how word meanings are being rapidly interpreted and put into context.鈥
This research is funded by the European Research Council.
Reference
Lyu, B. et al; PNAS (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1903402116
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