Your browser doesn't support javascript.
loading
Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution.
Jamali, Mohsen; Grannan, Benjamin; Cai, Jing; Khanna, Arjun R; Muñoz, William; Caprara, Irene; Paulk, Angelique C; Cash, Sydney S; Fedorenko, Evelina; Williams, Ziv M.
Afiliación
  • Jamali M; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Grannan B; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Cai J; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Khanna AR; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Muñoz W; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Caprara I; Department of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Paulk AC; Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Cash SS; Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Fedorenko E; Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Williams ZM; Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Nature ; 631(8021): 610-616, 2024 Jul.
Article en En | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38961302
ABSTRACT
From sequences of speech sounds1,2 or letters3, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing4-12, the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Moreover, rather than responding to the words as fixed memory representations, their activities were highly dynamic, reflecting the words' meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real time during speech and how they tracked the sentences in which they appeared. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how these representations mapped onto the cell population. Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.
Asunto(s)

Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Semántica / Percepción del Habla / Corteza Prefrontal / Comprensión / Análisis de la Célula Individual / Neuronas Límite: Adult / Aged / Female / Humans / Male / Middle aged Idioma: En Revista: Nature Año: 2024 Tipo del documento: Article País de afiliación: Estados Unidos

Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Semántica / Percepción del Habla / Corteza Prefrontal / Comprensión / Análisis de la Célula Individual / Neuronas Límite: Adult / Aged / Female / Humans / Male / Middle aged Idioma: En Revista: Nature Año: 2024 Tipo del documento: Article País de afiliación: Estados Unidos