Semantic predictability selectively modulates delta-band syntax tracking: evidence for good-enough parsing
Rafferty, M. B.; Brown, E. C.; Casenhiser, D. M. · neuroscience · 2026-09-07 · 原文
DOI：10.1101/2024.11.01.621536作者：3 位
Neural populations exhibit low-frequency phase synchrony to inferred phrase and constituent boundaries during speech comprehension, widely interpreted as reflecting the endogenous construction of syntactic structure. Good-enough processing (GEP) accounts suggest this structure-building is not obligatory for every utterance but graded: listeners may scale back syntactic computation when meaning can be recovered from local lexical-semantic context. Whether this graded reliance on syntax is reflected uniformly in delta-band neural activity remains unresolved, partly because syntactic processing comprises several dissociable demands that prior work has not modeled concurrently. We reanalyzed an open-source EEG dataset recorded during audiobook listening and used delta-band temporal response functions to model four syntactic constructs concurrently: syntactic surprisal, closing-node count, and integration and storage cost from Dependency Locality Theory. For each construct, we tested whether its contribution to the delta-band response was modulated by local semantic dissimilarity, computed from contextualized word embeddings. Semantic dissimilarity significantly modulated the response t
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1. 人话版
Neural populations exhibit low-frequency phase synchrony to inferred phrase and constituent boundaries during speech comprehension, widely interpreted as reflecting the endogenous construction of syntactic structure.
Good-enough processing (GEP) accounts suggest this structure-building is not obligatory for every utterance but graded: listeners may scale back syntactic computation when meaning can be recovered from local lexical-semantic context.
2. 领域脉络
本文类目：neuroscience，属于其所在研究脉络的最新进展。
3. 机制拆解
Whether this graded reliance on syntax is reflected uniformly in delta-band neural activity remains unresolved, partly because syntactic processing comprises several dissociable demands that prior work has not modeled concurrently.
We reanalyzed an open-source EEG dataset recorded during audiobook listening and used delta-band temporal response functions to model four syntactic constructs concurrently: syntactic surprisal, closing-node count, and integration and storage cost from Dependency Locality Theory.
4. 证据与数字
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5. 反例与边界
For each construct, we tested whether its contribution to the delta-band response was modulated by local semantic dissimilarity, computed from contextualized word embeddings.
6. 跨领域连接与意外收获
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