Semantic and Contextual Composition: Processing and Neurological Underpinnings

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Through a series of psychological and neuroimaging studies Dr. Maria M. Pinango will investigate how and where the brain decodes the information of a sentence in real-time, that is, as the sentence unfolds. Two experimental lines will be carried out: a psychological line and a neuroimaging line. Through the psychological line she will determine how the comprehension system reveals the processing of the different kinds of information contained in a sentence: syntactic, semantic and conceptual. Pinango's research model predicts that information about sentence structure (syntactic) is done immediately and with no cost, whereas information about the meaning information (semantic) takes time to develop and demands more computation. Finally, Pinango's model predicts that the process of placing the content of a sentence (conceptual information) into the larger context of what speakers know about the world is yet a costlier process as it requires the comprehension system to leave the language system and place the meaning of the sentence into the larger and richer conceptual system. Through the neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) line it will be determined how and where in the brain this parallel decoding of syntactic, semantic and conceptual information takes place. This research connects to important questions in linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive neurology and neuroscience. On the medical side, the research has implications for the study of brain pathologies as it seeks to answer the question of why on the one hand, special populations such as Alzheimer's patients, Schizophrenia patients have what appear to be intact linguistic ability yet are unable to fully comprehend sentences and, why on the other, cerebro-vascular patients such as Broca's aphasic patients have true linguistic impairments yet are able to show normal-like sentence comprehension. The project provides a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to receive intensive training in the demanding task of investigating a model of linguistic organization from the perspective of brain organization. In doing so it supports the crucial collaboration between researchers in linguistics and neuroscience at Yale University.