A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation
Nigel Flower, Liina Pylkkänen · 2026
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Description
Nigel Flower and Liina Pylkkänen use brain magnetic recordings, in a 2026 study, to ask whether words, phrases, and sentences pass through the same processing stages when seen all at once. Readers can grasp sentence structure in a flash, faster than older models allow.
All three forms gave highly alike waveform shapes, with early activity for raw form, then activity in left temporal and frontal areas tied to combining parts. One left frontal-temporal area tracked how common two-word pairs are, hinting at step-by-step probing after a first global snapshot. The authors propose a model where the brain first takes the whole shape, then tests how parts combine.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nigel Flower, Liina Pylkkänen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 70661 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |