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  • Perspective
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What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 24, pages 113–128 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations — chunking and multiscale information integration — and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.

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Fig. 1: Neural oscillations chunk linguistic input into syntactic phrases.
Fig. 2: Binding and symbolic propositions in DORA.
Fig. 3: Representation of a sentence with a single subject–verb dependency and multiple subject–verb dependencies in VS-BIND.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to E. Lau and M. Yoshida for their vast input and feedback. They also thank J. Mitchell for help with corpus data, J. Bowers for his comments and S. Brendecke for help with illustrations. N.K. acknowledges the support of the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation (grant 075-15-2022-1037). A.T. acknowledges the support of the Max Planck Society.

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  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Nina Kazanina

  2. Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Nina Kazanina

  3. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany

    Alessandro Tavano

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Kazanina, N., Tavano, A. What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building. Nat Rev Neurosci 24, 113–128 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00659-5

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